Just Say No To a Big WordPress Ping List

January 31, 2013 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

This post was originally published March 6, 2011. In it I published a WordPress ping list and an explanation on what I had done to vet it. However 2 years later I drastically reduced my ping list when I found out that pinging many (and potentially spammy) services might actually hurt your Google rankings.

What is a WordPress Ping List?

Whenever you publish a new post or make edits to your existing ones, WordPress will send a notification (called a ping) to the services on your ping list to let them know about your new or updated post. It’s been a good way to get the word out about your blog.

WordPress out of the box comes set up to notify one service rpc.pingomatic.com, and users can add to the list in the writing settings, as many bloggers have. However there are much better ways to notify Google of your new page or post.

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How We Increased Website Traffic by 150% by Fixing Duplicate Content

January 26, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

Most people outside the industry think that Technical SEO is all about on page optimization, in other words; updating a page’s meta data and content to have the right keywords in it. However there is another aspect of Technical SEO that has nothing with keywords and can be very powerful for larger dynamic websites. This discipline makes sure the site is search engine crawler friendly by making sure the search bots can find all the pages and also that there are not multiple URLs for a single page, also known as duplicate content. Duplicate content within a site is more common that you might think and I have repeatedly seen significant traffic increases by eliminating it. This is a case study of how we addressed over-indexation of duplicate content by Google and increased traffic by more than 150% overall.

The site in question is a B2B eCommerce site which does a brisk business on weekdays but has much lower traffic during the weekends and holidays. The chart below tracks its weekly non branded organic search traffic for the last 9 months. Here “non branded” means that we exclude organic traffic that arrives via company and domain name keywords, however note we do include product keywords which is a significant part of their traffic.

non branded organic traffic
Non Branded Organic Traffic – Weekly

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Google’s rel=author Authorship feature

January 14, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

This post originally appeared on October 28, 2011, in January 2014, I made several changes to it to bring it up to date. On August 28, 2014, Google ended the Google Authorship program citing low participation and concern over how it was cluttering the search experience, especially for mobile users. Despite this, you may want to still implement it if you are active on Google+. Users who are logged into their Google account and that follow you on Google+ will see the the enhanced snippet. Otherwise it’s not worth the effort.

Ah the old days. The early days when all Google looked at was how many backlinks pointed to your page. These days, trust, creditability and authority signals are a big part of what Google looks for when deciding whether to rank your page in the top ten. In the summer of 2011, leveraging Google profiles, Google released another feature that helps it do just that. You can now tag your articles with rel="author" HTML markup to link your pages to your Google profile – which makes you more “real” in Google’s eyes. The nice thing about this is that then Google will put a pic of you next to the snippet of your article that shows up in the search results as Danny Sullivan appears below.

Danny Sullivan article
Danny's article with SEO advice to Bill Gates

Google’s desire to tie content to “real” people perhaps sheds some light on the 2011 mass removal of non user Google+ accounts.

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Sitesell Migration to WordPress

December 7, 2012 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

migrating to a new home
The Traveling Suitcase: Dedicated to the Jewish children of the Kindertransport who found safety in Britain
Recently I migrated a site from the Sitesell ecosystem (that’s how I think of it) to WordPress. While Sitesell does a good job leading people through the process of building websites that attract organic search engine traffic, I made a decision about a year ago that I don’t want to work on anything else but WordPress these days (I’ll do SEO consulting for any type of site, but if I have to roll up my sleeves and actually work on the site – it’s got to be WordPress). WordPress is great for people like me, who aren’t really diehard developers but have enough technical chops to be dangerous. And the WordPress community is just outstanding. Plus I just don’t want to deal with another CMS (content management system) that has it’s own vernacular and way of doing things. We’ve all heard the saying “Do a few things well and not a lot of things poorly.” It’s time to live up to that goal.

To make this useful to more people, I’ll try to keep this more general so that it is relevant to migrations from other technologies. I also have a few cool plugins to recommend.

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Check your WordPress robots.txt file

December 3, 2012 / WordPress / by Kathy Alice

nerd details like your robots.txt are importantI recently looked at a client’s robots.txt file for a WordPress site. He had all sorts of things blocked (using the Disallow directives) including:


/*/feed/$
/*/comments/$
/*/trackback/$

As I have written before, robots.txt disallows are generally not as useful as people think they are. True, they prevent Google and other search engine spiders from crawling those URLs, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those pages don’t end up in the index (which is usually the reason for the Disallow directive.) These days we have much better tools at our disposal with the meta robots noindex tag and the canonical.

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Match.com Gets Social, Maybe a bit too much

November 12, 2012 / The Online Life / by Kathy Alice

match.comOnline dating sites. Despite their widespread use I still feel like there is a stigma attached to online dating, enough so that you don’t really want to admit in social conversations you have a profile on Match.com – let alone write a blog post on it. It feels like you are advertising to the world that you are desperate for a date. But, putting aside my misgivings and with low expectations, at the beginning of last summer I created a profile. Long story short I did not meet my current boyfriend through Match.com, but I really thought Match did a great job of enticing engagement on the site.

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