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Matt Cutts of Google gives a great interview about Search Engine Optimization and also the improvements made by WordPress 2.3 specially the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) improvements and other canonical URL improvements that went into the latest version of WordPress

Popularity: 18% [?]

So, how does one Increase Search Engine rankings, bring in increased Search Engine Traffic and also prevent duplicate content on your blog or website using a single robots.txt file?

What is a robots.txt file?

robots.txt protocol also called the Robots Exclusion standard is used by web spiders and other web robots such as Search engine robots, blog robots, splog robots, adsense robot etc and prevents them from accessing all or part of a blog or a website which is otherwise, publicly viewable.

By placing a robots.txt file on your blog or website you are telling the specified robots to ignore and prevent their indexing of the specified files or directories.

Why is the robots.txt important for my blog?

Search Engines penalize duplicate content by placing that particular post or in some instances an entire blog or website in their supplemental index. Also known as Search Engine Hell, if your post goes into the supplemental index of a search engine, it might take almost 6-8 months for it to come out into the regular index and that too after you removed the duplicate content from that particular post.

Okay, so a Robots.txt file might prevent duplicate content. How does it increase my search engine rankings?

Simple, having a clean blog makes search engines think that you do not host spammy content and if you write good content, the robots will keep coming and index your site everyday instead of once every week. Also by preventing duplicate content, you prevent articles from going into the supplemental index which in turn means that people can find that post when they search on Google or any other search engine, which in turn means you get more traffic! Prominent blogger Neil Patel wrote on his Link Building blog that by using a robots.txt file, his web site traffic went up by 11.3%.

What content does one need to prevent the search engine robots on a website from accessing using a robots.txt file?

a. We need to deny the search engine bots and robots from accessing our WordPress folders or if you have a Movable type blog, your movable type folder. For example, in the picture below, you can see that Google is trying to access a file within my WordPress blog folder and throwing out a 403 (not found) error. This is bad

b. Remove comment feeds from the search results. You should never block the robots from accessing comments on your posts, but block the search engines from accessing your comment feeds as this would result in duplicate content.

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Popularity: 15% [?]

Permalinks are permanent URLs to your posts, articles and other lists on your WordPress Blog. It is the URL used by your blog visitors as well as Search engines. Having an optimal Permalink Structure for your blog is very important for Search Engine Optimization.

An example of a poor URL structure could be

http://www.exampleblog.com/2007/05/18/archives/p=?421

Instead, a more efficient URL structure for a blog would be

http://www.exampleblog.com/category/post-title

If you are a new blogger and wish to optimize your blog, then use the helpful hints and the code required to optimize your blog with an optimal URL permalink structure 

However, for those people who have been blogging for a while, if you just change your permalink structure, you will end up with a lot of broken 404 links. So, how do we do a permalink migration for a wordpress blog and still keep search engines and more important visitors to your blog who might have bookmarked your old permalink structure happy. We use the Permalinks Migration Plugin and change the permalink structure of your blog without breaking the old links to your website

Plugin Name: Permalinks Mirgration Plugin

Plugin Author: Dean Lee

Plugin Page:

http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/

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Popularity: 30% [?]

In case you didn’t know, Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog posts. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article(or section) , or how you may send a link to your story in an email message or post it on a social bookmarking site. Especially when they are used to link to individual posts, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change. Hence … permalink 

If you are a new beginner using WordPress, having an optimal URL structure for your blog is very important firstly because search engines love it and bring in more people to your blog. Also, once your links are linked back by the various websites out there or indexed by the search engines, it can become very difficult to change your permalink structure as they will then lead to broken 404 links.

An optimal URL structure will not have numbers or strange characters in its permalink. A permalink or the URL of the post should help the visitor decide the contents of the post better.

Here is an example of a poor URL structure for a wordpress blog:

http://www.example.com/2007/04/19/archives/p=?420

Instead, here is an example of an efficient URL structure for a wordpress blog:

http://www.example.com/category/post-title

Having such an optimal URL structure makes your blog a lot more user friendly than the default options in wordpress as shown below. More importantly, you will increase your search engine rankings as a lot of search engines give a high weight for keywords present in the URL structure.

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Popularity: 45% [?]