Rothemund » SEO

Impact of Wordpress theme on search engine results

Holger — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:06:53 +0000

A few days ago I have switched the theme of this blog from freicurv to WP-Polaroid and since then the visits on my blog (not very many visitors anyway) went down to zero yesterday.

I hope this switch to a new theme did not impact my search engine results that much and it is just a temporary issue. Especially for the Icybox 4220 I had quite good positions.

UPDATE I: Of course the theme has an impact on the visits, at least if you have the google analytics code hard coded into your theme... I guess the problem was, that I did not have the Google Analytics tracking code on the page anymore. We will see what tomorrow brings.

UPDATE II: The installation of the Wordpress Plugin for Google Analytics didn't help either. There is something wrong with that WP-Polaroid theme when it comes to web analytics. None of the tools that I was testing was working anymore, so I switched back to freicurv for now. It's too late to figure out what is wrong with the theme.

Google penalty because of excluding the bot temporary by robots.txt?

Holger — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 09:59:53 +0000

One of my websites was mistakenly excluded from crawling by a wrong entry in the robots.txt. When I noticed the drop in visits it was already too late. The search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) had removed the website already from their index.

I have changed the robots.txt immediately, but until now the website is not back in the index. I have checked in Googles Webmaster Tools and everything seems to be OK. I know it can take a while until you show up in the index, but from my experience it never takes that long.

Therefore I was wondering whether Google might have some penalty for websites which did not allow their bot to access the website. Maybe that it takes simply far longer until it can be reincluded? Did someone make the same experience? Any answers?

Wordpress Plugin: Don’t index my feed

Holger — Wed, 23 May 2007 21:12:27 +0000

Maybe you saw my post about my problem to exclude the feed from the search result pages. To avoid duplicate content I wanted to exclude the feeds from the content, so they can not draw any attention from the actual blog post. Finally I found out why Google had denied my request and fixed that problem (I had made a mistake in the robots.txt). But there was an additional problem: what about the comment feeds?

I could exclude those feeds by including

disallow */feed/

but the as I have learned the robots.txt just prevents the search robots to spider a file, but it does not prevent it from showing up in the SERPs, when someone is linking to you. Therefore a

noindex

can help. I finally found the Wordpress plugin "Don't index my feed" which adds code to each feed to prevent the robots from indexing the files. Let's see how this works.

Google Webmaster Tools: URL removal request denied!

Holger — Tue, 15 May 2007 22:26:10 +0000

A few days ago I have requested Google via Webmaster Tools to exclude my feed from the search result pages, as I think it is some kind of duplicate content and I do not see why the feed should appear in the SERPs. As Google's Webmaster Tools offer this feature "URL removals" I thought I might give it a try.

For Google to remove a URL you have to do one of the following:

* Ensure requests for the page return an HTTP status code of either 404 or 410. [?]
* Block the page using a robots.txt file. [?]
* Block the page using a meta noindex tag. [?]

So what I did was to update my robots.txt with "disallow: feed/" and just waited. Today I checked the SERPs by using site:rothemund.org just to see that http://www.rothemund.org/feed/ is still listed. So back to the Webmaster Tools and what do I have to see? This:

Why the hell does Google deny this request? I just don't get it. Maybe I have to ask Matt Cutts: Dear Matt, why the hell Google is denying my URL removal request? Not sure if he is really interested in me, though.

Or maybe the guys at Google get angry and remove my whole domain from the index? I don't hope so.

Anyone of you guys out there can explain it to me? Is it because it is a feed? Did I do something wrong in my robots.txt (I reviewed it and did not find anything strange - but then you never know).

UPDATE: It was all my fault. Google denied the removal request, because in fact the folder http://www.rothemund.org/feed/ was not disallowed by the robots.txt. I had made an mistake in the robots.txt: I forgot the "/" at the beginning of each folder or file. After I had changed that and made a new URL removal request it took about 6 hours and the removal was done. With site:rothemund.org the feed folder can not be found any more. No I only have to find a solution how to get the feed folder at the end of each post out of the SERPs. Any ideas?

New Google Analytics

Holger — Tue, 08 May 2007 19:17:58 +0000

Today when I logged into my Google Analytics account I was informed that Google within the next month all Google Account will be updated.

The tour provided by Google looks very promising and interesting. Google Analytics was always a very interesting Tool for web analytics, but this new interface and the new statistics seem to be a huge step ahead (as far as I could see in the tour).

Unfortunately I still have the old interface, but I am really looking forward to make first tests. You will be able to create your own personalized dashboard, with the statistics and figure you want to see on first glimpse. This will accelerate the daily analysis of your web site traffic. The definition of time slots also seems to be improved.

A very interesting features is the so called "site overlay": it will allow you to see certain information directly on your website, like how many visitors clicked on which link, etc.

Once I have access to the new interface I will give you a better overview.