The MORE tag, why you should be friends, and making Google love you.
December 22, 2008 – 23:33Let’s debate about the usage of the Wordpress more tag, or the split post. I use it to minimize the space each of my posts take up on my home page, thus leaving more and MOAR! space for more and diverse topics, so to speak.
I also think it breaks up the articles pretty nicely and minimizes the amount of scrolling you have to do to get thru the posts.
However! There is another huge reason to use the more tag. Search Engine Friendliness. If you just use the default Wordpress settings, you will end up displaying the same bunch of words four of five times on your website. This invokes the “duplicate content penalty” that will end up costing you standings with Google and the other major search engines. (This is due to the abuse of the article writing Google spammers abusing adsense, but that will be another rant.)
The duplicate content penalty comes about due to large amounts of significantly identical text being shown on numerous pages throughout the internet, not a few characters or even a couple of sentences. Wordpress blogs allow bloggers the option to use what is called the “more” tag, where they can limit the amount of text that is displayed on the blogs main page, the category pages and the archive pages. By utilizing this tag, Wordpress users are limiting the content for a post to be displayed, in full, only on the posting page itself; thus removing four of the five aforementioned instances of locations of duplicate content when adding a post to their blog, which can help to decrease the chances of being affected by the dreaded duplicate content penalty.
Another good thing to do is go to your reading settings and set article feed to summary. This minimizes the amount of text that you syndicate in your RSS feeds. Not a bad thing to direct traffic and make it easier for your subscribers to read, anyway.
Something else that I like to do is talk about my previous posts. Sometimes I will think of something else, or someone will blog about one of my articles, and that makes me think of something else. It’s very ok to link to your own past articles. I don’t know where the idea came from that talking about your own writing is bad.
Chris Stith, owner of 42 Groundhogs Design, and one of my partners in crime, also mentioned to me to never EVER forget a Google friendly sitemap. Now I have found that the easiest way to do this is to use the XML Sitemap Generator plugin written by Arne Brachhold. It updates the sitemap when you update your blog, it works, and best, it works without you doing anything after the initial setup. Get it. Set it up! It also notifies Ask, MSN, and maybe Yahoo.
I also use a plugin for custom page titles, just look up to see what they do. Again, more unique and interesting non-duplicated content for Google and the others to like.
There are quite a few things that you can do to get yourself noticed. Experiment.
2 Responses to “The MORE tag, why you should be friends, and making Google love you.”
That’s an excellent point about duplicate content. I’d never thought much about it like that.
I’ve been using the more tag for space saving on the front page, breaking the article at an appropriate time, and along with that- as a teaser for enticing readers to read the rest.
Often I’ll do a funny lead in to a story, trying to illicit a laugh and a wtfbbq, such as the one on my latest post (Dancin Capn’ Jack. Go read it, you will laugh. Probably.)
Other times I’ll entice people with a picture, like the post before the most recent one, where somehow I’ve managed to reference a Sunstreaker\Green Goblin\Dick in a box scenario with a post that’s mostly text and telling a story about Walmart refusing to buy me alcohol.
Thanks for the info.
~Matt Booker
By Matt on Dec 23, 2008
It’s actually a ‘duplicate content filter’, not a penalty. If a search matches a chunk of content that’s duplicated on several different pages, Google will try to pick the ‘best’ one, based on links and trust and all that. It won’t show the other four by default, but it doesn’t penalize the ranking of the one it does show. (If it did, article syndication would be a very bad idea, and your enemies could hurt you by simply copying your content to lots of junk sites.) But it’s probably a good idea to encourage search engines to direct people to your single-post pages, since that’s where the comments boxes are, so it saves people clicking.
I’ve been meaning to use the -more- tag, but I keep forgetting. I definitely prefer the look like you’ve got, where people can see the last few posts on the main page without scrolling way down. I tried letting WP do excerpts automatically, but that does unpleasant things when a post starts with an image or list or anything but plain text. Guess I just need to remember to use the tag.
By Aaron on Dec 23, 2008