Google loves blogs, especially Wordpress, and while i love Wordpress, there are certain things that are needed to optimize your Wordpress blog (which i need to start applying as well) well I am really not looking to rank my website for any certain keyword as you can see from my title, thats probably why your probably going to see some of things that I advise you to do not being done here, but dont get confused, i still do them on my other blogs that I do want to rank well on!

The biggest issue with Wordpress blogs is the duplicate content that Wordpess’s structure has, duplicate content as you know might lead to a penalty from Google, so, here are some tips that you can apply to your Wordpress blog, or for any other blog for that matter than has the same issues.

1- Block out the archives from robots.txt, blogs as you know have archives, and while those archives are useful for your readers, they could be damaging to your rankings since each single post you make has an exact copy of it in those archives, doing this is very simple and can be achieved using 2 lines of code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /archives/

This is of course, if your archives folder is one level deeper than your root directory.

2- Use a Wordpress theme that only displays the 1st paragraph (or couple of lines) on your blogs index, and followed by a more link to the full story, in the case of my blog, the whole post is available on the index page, and a complete copy of the post is included in its own url, which is exactly what duplicate content filters is made for!

3- Select the most appropriate category for your post, so you should always have each post in only one category, much like this post which is included in the SEO category only, having it in multiple categories creates different urls for the exact same post. Do you use, Mozilla Fire Fox?

If your interested in learning more tricks about robots.txt and how you can use it to block certain areas of your website that you know has duplicate content, or if your looking for more information about it in general, check out Webmasterworld’s robots.txt forum.

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