by Charles Grimm on July 15, 2010
Do robots like your source code?
I was searching the other day for a robots.txt file example and it took me a few minutes to find some fragmented samples in forums. So here is a quick post for you wordpress bloggers who are managing your own Search Engine Optimization..SEO.
Joomla fortunately, automatically sets up a robot.txt file when you do your install through cpanel.
With wordpress for some reason, you need to do it manually. I find this a bit bizarre especially since WP espouses to be very search engine friendly right out of the gate. Anyways here is a a basic robot.txt sample.
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: /category/*/*
Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */feed
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Allow: /wp-content/uploads
# Google Image
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*
# Google AdSense
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*
# digg mirror
User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Copy and paste this into a file named robots.txt;
You can use notepad, word or any text program will work. Then, upload the this to the root level of your domain. Another way is to just add a plugin to your wordpress blog. There are several robot.txt plugins to choose from, some will add a meta robots tag to your wordpress pages.
Here is another more comprehensive wordpress robots.txt example.
For more tips on robot.txt and search engine optimization you can post a question in the comments section.
Note, if you are a building blog, wordpress has the best user interface and is great for fast preformatted content development. However if you are building a website with several different types of content that need function, I would check out Joomla 1.5 and it’s joomla seo extensions.
What CMS platform do you prefer for building the best search engine optimization into your website, Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress?
by Charles Grimm on April 27, 2010
This is a list of SEO Blogs written by some of todays foremost SEO experts. A good place to start and keep going back if you want to stay up on the latest search engine optimization news, strategies and practices.
SEO Blogs that provide daily online marketing training.
If you have more great SEO resources or notable people to add please let me know.
by Charles Grimm on January 21, 2010
Just a quick post. This a pretty cool and useful SEM tool if your an SEO advanced or just a beginner. It is a link popularity checker plus a back link analysis tool. As part of the SEOmoz portfolio of tools Open Site Explorer is powered by the Linkscape Web index. See a complete review of this tool.
by Charles Grimm on December 16, 2009
by Charles Grimm on October 13, 2009
If you work in Joomla a fair bit as I do, at some point you will be considering the best way to eliminate duplicate content.
Within the Joomla.org site there are a couple of options for the Joomla Canonical URL Tag that you may want to consider. These are pretty simple to use, yet I find not the most effective way to deal with duplicate content in Joomla.
Joomla Canonical and SEO extensions in general are not as effective as the Wordpress SEO plugins. If you have a choice in building a client site that needs more SEO ease and effectiveness out of the box then wordpress is your best product.
Joomla however is great product for more functionality and really has a much more sophisticated open source CMS platform for easily building and maintaining more complex business websites.
So if your are building a dynamic CMS using joomla, I find the best way to solve your duplicate content issues is by employing one or both of these methods:
1. Do a .htaccess rewrite and /or 2. Do a simple redirect within your cpanel
1 .htaccess rewrite
This file is located in your public html (www) folder.
What this does. It rewrites your domain from http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com
This is a permanent rewrite that will also be reflected in the address bar of your browser.
Add this script to your .htaccess.
# mod_rewrite in use
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ “http://www.yourdomain.com/$1″ [R=301,L] |
2. The Redirect
Since Joomla doesn’t have any good Free plugins for this yet, here is a paid extension I found but have not yet tried…Joomla SEO 301 Redirect.
However if you have access to your cpanel you have two easy and better options:
1. Do a redirect under ‘Addon Domains’ and/or 2. Do a redirect under ‘Redirects’
1. Add-on Domains
Use this if you have a parked domain on top of your site domain and you want to make sure that Google isn’t indexing your parked domain. Just follow the instructions in ‘figure A’.
Figure A
2. Redirects
Use this if you want to redirect individual duplicate content pages.
i.e http://yourdomain.com/index.php?option=com_user&view=photos&return=aHR0c
to:
http://www.yourdomain.com/user/Charles-Grimm/photos.html
I know I have cut to the chase here pretty quickly, but if you have any questions or comments on SEO for Joomla please let me know in the comments area. Cheers C.
