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WilliamBay

Just curious if people are still using WordPress Tags.

I wonder if with the direction Google is going the last couple years, having sites that get bloated with extraneous Tag archives just decreases the quality of the site.

WilliamBay

And... as it turns out, I was part of the problem. I had a DoFollow directory on my site that people could use for a little Blog Love action.
There was also a thread on a photography group that has been going on since 2009, that I encouraged people to use over the years.

I've written a blog post here http://flauntyoursite.com/jig-is-up/ denouncing the practice. I have a bit of clout in the photography communities, so hopefully this spreads out there.

Marie, if you wouldn't mind reading this and letting me know if there's anything you think should be added, I'd appreciate it.

I let people down big time. I hope the word can get out there and fix this thing.

WilliamBay

Thanks Marie,

I will shoot you an email. Most of my clients are photographers (I do custom website design as well as SEO), so if this is something that's happening more and more, it'd be good to have a solution for them.

WilliamBay

Thanks EGOL,

I spent a little time investigating to rule out other issues. I didn't want to rush to a conclusion. But I'm fairly positive we're looking at Penguin now.

Since Penguin isn't really my area of expertise, do you have recommendations for good services that are skilled in determining which links would be causing problems?

Thanks!

WilliamBay

Thanks Chris and EGOL,

Most photographers actually do use commenting as a means to up their DA/PA. They occasionally get posts from wedding blogs as features with links back to them. But the majority of the industry uses comments. Plenty of sites have maintained rankings with that link strategy (I'm not saying if it's good/bad or even sustainable over the long term, just saying what has worked for years).
Could this just be a situation where having hundreds of more links than your competitors could cause the problems?

Also, are there any tools that you'd recommend that could start to actually figure out if the links truly are bad?

And EGOL, what is it that bothers you about the links to other sites? Most photographers do this as a way to promote vendors that were at the wedding. Reading it I admit it's a bit link heavy in the amount of text they have on each post, but is there anything inherently wrong with 5-10 outbound links on posts?

Thanks guys.
William

WilliamBay

Search Term is Indianapolis Wedding Photographers.

Site is http://www.tallandsmallphotography.com/

Their metrics are through the roof compared to everyone else's. They've dropped from 27 in May to 40 Now. 'A' Grade on-site optimization.

Either there's too many links, or there's some bad links involved... I don't know which it is...

WilliamBay

Short answer: Highly doubt it.

Long answer: I haven't seen anything from any of the ranking factors Moz, or anyone else produces, that would indicate so.
And under normal linking I can't imagine a situation that would cause a User based issue (like increased bounces because you got launched in another window), unless it's really excessive.
For example, I deal with professional photographers sites, and they sometimes have a portfolio site, and a blog, and sometimes they are two different systems with two different experiences and often times open the other in a new window. That is very annoying and a can kill a user's experience and they end up with high bounce rates.

I think if you're just sending links to other useful sites, target="_blank" is perfectly fine to use. I do it on my site all the time.

WilliamBay

I know this almost a year after it was asked, but since I was doing a little research, I thought I'd provide a solution I came up with.

When I design a site, I want an attribution link on every page. I can't rely on a visitor saying "I love this site, who designed it?" 3 levels deep, not finding an attribution at the bottom, then thinking that they'd find it on the home page. It doesn't even make good usability sense.

So here's what I set out to do with my sites moving forward:

Still doing Sitewide links, but only the link on the Home Page will be followed. All other links will be NoFollowed.

If you use WordPress, you can use the following conditional statement. (Of course you'll want to replace your own Anchor Text and URL (unless you design pretty websites and want to give me the credit ).

if ( is_front_page() ) { echo "[](;Flaunt Your Site](;<span style=)";

} else {
echo "[
echo "http://flauntyoursite.com";](;Flaunt Your Site](;

It's important to leave the Space between the " and the rel=" otherwise it will collapse the url into something not readable and give you a 404 when you try to click it.

Hope this helps some of you.

WilliamBay

Thanks much Erica!!! Looking forward to it.

WilliamBay

I really love the webinars! I listen to them on long walks occasionally, but I haven't seen one in May or June.

When will the next one be? Thanks!

I apologize if this should have gone to the help desk...

WilliamBay

What happens when you use tags is that you create a page that is called www.your-domain.com/tag/tag-name. You also have the original blog post which is www.your-domain.com/blog-post.

They have two completely separate URLs, but they have the exact same content.

This is exacerbated when you use multiple tags because you increase the amount of chances for duplicate content to be created. And again it's even more expounded when you take into account the Categories, and Date Based Archives.

The solution is to use something like the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and use no-index for everything that you don't want indexed. In my case I want Categories indexed, so I no-index Tags and Date Based Archives.

If you use Yoast's plugin I have put together a fairly easy article on how to initially set it up, and it is pretty helpful in understanding some of the settings. It's geared mainly for photographers running their own site, but should be just as valuable to you.
You can find it here http://www.themoderntog.com/how-to-configure-wordpress-seo-plugin-by-yoast-for-maximum-online-exposure

WilliamBay

I would only run one SEO plugin at a time. Use either Yoast SEO or All In One SEO, but not both. They both change variables on the site that could conflict with one another.

I guest wrote an article for The Modern Tog on how to properly set up the Yoast SEO plugin.
http://www.themoderntog.com/how-to-configure-wordpress-seo-plugin-by-yoast-for-maximum-online-exposure

In my opinion it's the best plugin out there. But you need to know how to effectively set it up. Once you get it set up, you only need to use it on a post by post basis.

WilliamBay

Since you're describing directories, they may be on a level that is very deep. There was a blog post (I think it was a YouMoz post, but I can't find it) from last year sometime that talked about the depth of directories being an issue for not only Open Site Explorer, but Google as well.

If the links are too deep (like 6 or more levels):

The bots and crawlers don't even bother crawling that deep into a site
The page authority that particular page has may not even be worth much
If the page is worth a lot, it's because other people are linking to it and would get indexed from those locations instead

If you want those pages to index, you will have to go about it yourself. I remember the article mentioned that you can Tweet the page (maybe in the style of "Hey, look I just got listed here..." ).
Also if it's something of interest you could send a link from your own website. I've done that with Bio's that are buried rather deep, like Flickr or About.me.

So it's not really Open Site Explorer and Google, but rather the depth at which your links are is more than likely the issue.

If while looking at a directory in the process of trying to get a link, I would look at it's Page Authority in Open Site Explorer or using the Toolbar to find out if the page you would be on is even on the map. If it has Page Authority, it has a good chance that it's indexed at Google as well, and may be a link of value.

WilliamBay

Hi Mike,

I see. So theoretically speaking someone creates 10 different Tumbler accounts. Each with a unique domain (using the Tumbler unique domain method).

Yes, each one will be a completely different domain, but, also, they will more than likely be of the same 1 C-Block or maybe even the same 1 IP (not sure how Tumbler handles their subdomain IP structure). Since they are all hosted through Tumbler on their servers.

It's not the end of the world, but it's also not the link diversity that you thought you might get. Many people have Tumbler accounts and I don't think Google will treat each one as if it was owned by the same person.
That being said, if each of your Tumbler accounts use the same Anchor Text, or share similarities in other aspects (linking to other similar sites, being mostly linky over providing quality content, similar usernames, etc.) Google will more than likely be able to sniff that out and not see those as valuable links.

From a link building perspective it seems that there are better methods. In this hypothetical case, you'll have to remember that there are now 10 micro-sites that you have to generate some value to by building links to and content on for there to even be a little bit of juice to pass along to the site you really want to rank...
Quite a lot of hustle for a little bit of payoff.

WilliamBay

I posted this article I wrote the other day for someone asking a similar question.

http://www.themoderntog.com/how-to-configure-wordpress-seo-plugin-by-yoast-for-maximum-online-exposure

With the Yoast SEO Plugin I no-index everything except Categories. You can see how I set mine up under section 3. Indexation.

Here is the original question that Sha submitted:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-is-with-wordpress-dupe-issues

WilliamBay