the logical home buyer: madison, wi and beyond…

Just in case any of you might be inclined to think I’ve fizzled out already on the blog thing…that’s not it.

I love my blog architecture. I’ve got lots to say, not to mention a huge amount of content from twenty, plus, years of fiduciary client representation to upload, BUT, my blog posts are not getting indexed by Google!

You see, there’s this little thing about Wordpress blogs, in their native design, that causes Google–in many instances–to consider content from Wordpress blogs to be spam. (At least that’s one school of thought. After poking around some more, there are other that say this is balderdash.)

It’s called the duplicate content penalty. The reason it (supposedly) arises, is because when you make a post in your Wordpress blog, Wordpress automatically duplicates that content and puts it in whatever Categories you specify it should go into, into your Archives, into your newsreader feeds…and perhaps other places, within your blog. (At the same time it goes out as an entirely new post.)

That’s great, architecturally speaking…but can be the kiss of death for getting your posts to be indexed by Google, which–let’s face it–is 99% of the whole point of blogging in the first place. (Google is the 800 lb. gorilla of search engines, after all.)

If you build it, they will come…but, only if they can find it. And, if Google doesn’t index you, they–that would be the general public–are very unlikely to find you.

Anyway…I’m doing all kinds of reading, and tweaking, and reading…and tweaking, to structure my blog in such a way that this duplicate content penalty no longer is having an impact on my blog, if that’s even the likely problem…

I’m hoping I may actually have it figured out, but am not sure. I’ve decided to put this entry up on my blog, in order to see if it gets indexed. You watch, though…since I used the word Google in my title, it’ll probably get indexed just because they crawl anything which has their name in it, rendering my little experiment here, worthless.

I’m now starting to think that the best I may be able to obtain is indexing in the Google Blogs section–which also isn’t currently happening–though the fact that I do have a standalone domain, hosted by my own internet service provider–instead of having Wordpress host my blog–ought to help me avoid only being indexed in the Blog section of Google.

This is so frustrating! I have pretty much figured out all other aspects of what I want Wordpress to do…but I’m being denied the very thing that’s most important to me, which is getting my blog postings to appear on normal Google searches!

Go figure…

Jay w/Excel-EBA

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Technical.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.