WordPress 3.0 and SEO
Talking of the jump in visitor stats at Storynory, I also wonder if the latest version of WordPress has helped the site’s search optimisation.
WordPress 3.0 has better enforcement of content generation on the fly, so that you don’t get the same content on numerous different URLs. Some of it, we were doing already, like diverting www.storynory.com to storynory.com. But I also understand that the old WordPress was capable of creating pages with a whole load of different variations in the address. As is well known, Google does not like duplicate content. Eliminating it might have helped our search results.
Something that upgrading WordPress forced me to do, sort of by accident, was to change our archives. Storynory’s Archive Page is the second most visited page after the home page. I was using the very nice looking Ajax archives generated by Extended Live Archive, but because it was in JavaScript, Google couldn’t see the links it generated. ELA doesn’t work in WordPress 3.0, so now I have an HTML page, divided up into categories. This is generated using the WordPress tag ‘get_posts’. Effectively, it’s a site map, and I think that might have cheered up Google too.
I don’t know for sure if upgrading WordPress has helped Storynory’s SEO, but it certainly didn’t do any harm, and it has been a good month for visitor stats.
