Two tips to avoid Duplicate Content:
Robots.txt or Meta Robots WordPress Plugin

Do you use tags? Did you know they can bash your Google Page rank? But you can fix that?

Reading Graywolf’s blog, I was reminded to watch out for duplicate content issues and Wordpress. It turns out that the wordpress default doesn’t nofollow “tags”.

Because bloggers who tag posts tend to create zillions of tags, they often end up with exactly one post in a many individual “/tag/” directories. This nearly always create duplicate content, which is not a good thing.

You’ll want to fix this; it’s fairly easy. I fixed the issue by modifying my robots.txt file.

What’s a Robot.txt file?

The robots.txt file is a plain text file you place in your root directory. It tells robots not to crawl specific files thereby eliminating the duplicate content issue.

The robot.txt file for BigBucksBlogger now reads like this:

Click here to read more.
 

Tags:duplicate content plugins robots.txt robots txt seo tags WordPress

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Lucia’s Linky Love for WP 2.3:
Option to follow trackback immediately.

I’ve updated Lucia’s Linky Love for WP 2.3. Sort of. It turned out the plugin already worked for WP 2.3. However, I did make a two mods at user request:

1. Josh Spaulding requested the ability to dofollow trackbacks immediately. That function now exists.
2. Tricia identified a bug that appeared to sometimes occur when people left “names” with apostrophe (that is “‘”) in them. I think I coded corrected.

If you’d like the new version, download Lucia’s Linky Love for WP 2.3. Unzip. Place in plugin folder. Deactivate the old version, activate this one.

If you notice any problems, let me know so I can fix.

A word or caution
Trackback spam can be particularly pesky. I have seen a rash of semi-innocent looking scraper blogs that post snippets of your content. I call these Daegan Spam. If you keep those trackbacks and visit later, you will notice the blogs get redirected to irrelevant thin-affiliate sites for commercial products. This causes you to link into a “bad neighborhood”, which is a bad thing.

I’m planning a tool to help us find these things months later, “just in case”, but haven’t thought through the best way to do it yet.

Meanwhile, be very vigilant about trackback spam. When in doubt delete.

In the “irony” department

I found a bug in “Hide Sponsored Categories Plugins” for 2.3. It only happens for categories that have apostrophe’s in their name. I have such a category. It’s the one for “Lucia’s Linky Love!” So, I’m currently running the old version. Needless to say, I’ll be fixing that bug!
Tags:dofollow Lucias Linky Love plugins WordPress

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Improve Your Better Feed:
Wordpress Plugin

Do you want to find a way to improve your feed be a great way to get good traffic, (possibly) attracting more Diggs, and Stumbles? Well, why not add a link to comments, the blog post, and to any social networks they might wish to click?

You can do this fairly easily using Better Feed, which improves your feed in a number of ways. It automatically

1. Adds a permalink to your post at the bottom of the feed.
2. Adds a link to comments to the bottom of the feed.
3. Adds links to categories at the bottom of the feed and
4. Adds links to Technorati.

It also permits you, the blogger to add additional html text.

My knitting blog displays a footer that almost matches the default; I replaced some paragraph breaks with line breaks. This is what the footer on the feed of my knitting blog as displayed in Google Reader.

Are you saying “Big deal”? Well, the link to comments, in particular, can encourage some regular visitors to come to the blog to post their own comment.

I’d show you the BigBucksBlogger footer, but the feed exists only after I hit “publish”, the Google reader only displays the new feed a little later. (The time delay is a bit inconvenient if you edit, since you’ll need to publish, then read your footer. Plus, the feed services can be stubborn about updated– which is why some of you may see typos in the footer today! But.. oh well. )

How can you customize the footer?

First, you don’t need to customize. The default footer is already terrific. But if you want to add or remove things to the footer, you should look for the bit of code that falls between ‘ <<<FEEDFOOT’ and ‘FEEDFOOT;’

Start by adding html you’d like to appear after the “Technorati” link. Then examine your footer, and you can start to move things around.

Over the next few days, I’ll be adding appropriate links to encourage people to add my post to social networks. When I figure that out, I’ll let you know how to do it! Tags:plugins WordPress

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