Avoid Google Penalty

We work hard; spending every minute building our blog only to know that it was penalized by Google. Everything was checked thoroughly including for duplicate contents where people copy your post and re-published in their website.

What is your reaction? No matter how mad you are, there isn’t much that can be done. Eventually, duplicate contents from other blogs are not the main contributor of being penalized by Google. The main culprit is your blog itself! Here’s why.

Most of us have Archives page where all our posts compiled either in form of categories or monthly archives. If you used excerpts widely, this should reduce the problem but what if you display the whole content? Google sees it as duplicate internal content and this is where the penalization comes to action.

Eventually, you can implement some codes of prevention and it’s fairly easy too. Prevent Google from indexing archives page! There are 2 methods of doing it either by way of robot.txt or meta tag. As for meta tag, open your header.php and insert the code anywhere between the <head></head> tags.

Option 1: using robot.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/theme_name/archive.php

Option 2: using meta tag

<?php if(is_achieve()){ ?><meta name="robot" content="noindex"><?php } ?>

What the code does is to notify Google to exclude archives page for indexing. That way, Google will not index your posts contained within this page instead treats the traffics as it comes directly from the single post.

Alternatively, if you reluctant to modify your files, there’s a plugin that will do the work work you: Robots Meta. I don’t know how it performs since I don’t use it but reading from the post, it sounds worth a try.

Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.

Caution! You are advised to retype the code above as sometimes copy and paste produced unexpected results.

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Posted on: June 2, 2008 | Under Tips & Tricks 
 

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