In August, 2006 SEO Black Hat had these Search Numbers:
14258 - Google
1603 - MSN
1266- Yahoo
41 - Ask Jeeves
19 - Google Images
Up from these numbers in July, 2006:
11995 - Google
1145 - MSN
828 - Yahoo
514 - Google Images
34 - Ask Jeeves
As an experiment in both SEO and usability, I deleted all the Category links from the sidebar and put a link to every post ever written from most recent to “Hello World.” It should be too many links on each page. Really, I just wanted to see what happens if I make it easy for people to browse every post at a glance from every page - the SEO part is just an interesting side note.
Also, I deleted the sitemap.txt and sitemap.xml from the server and deleted the sitemap from Google Webmaster Tools. Let’s see what the next 30 days brings . . .
10 Responses to “On Site Intra-Linking Wordpress SEO Experiment”
You seem to go supplemental after 180 or so pages, that would be a good number to watch as well
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:seoblackhat.com&hl=en&lr=&start=180&sa=N
Those are link count numbers?
Does this alteration remove your category landing pages? I mean if you have a
category “foo” you have a top “foo” page with your most recent 5 to 10 posts
tagged with “foo”. Sometimes I get search referrals to these category pages
rather than a specific posting because presumeably WordPress and Google’s
algorithm jells with keyword frequency or some unexpect amalgamation of words
creating phrases I never even used.
Anyway losing these category pages or at least easy access to them for search
engine spiders would be an unfortunate side effect of this experiment.
I got rid of the monthly links, but I have the calendar plugin if people really
want to navigate by date rather than category which makes more sense. Who cares
what you wrote on November 12th 2005.
I only wish you would’ve done it earlier, it was a tremendous pain in the ass reading everypost in here going backwords from the homepage, well worth it though.
Muskie,
Yea I had done some category foo. I don’t really expect this layout to the optimal way to go. It’s more an experiment in intra linking. My site map had been more than 800 page - but my category pages would rarely get any natural links. Yahoo says I have Pages (1,737) | Inlinks (3,929) from external sites.
But I would bet that those 5404 links are spread over about 300 pages. By intralinking those 300 or so pages, it may produce some interesting results. Plus, I was finding it a pain to find old posts and the google site search was producing shit results. This setup will make it easy for people to read every post and may result in some backlinks to old posts and hopefully improve the relevancy of search queries.
You could use both.. categories and the way you do with those posts.. i have not the balls to display every post on a blog like you do.. but if it faills.. why not try both.. i think you need your categories..
I think it would be much more usable to have the links sorted by category, with headings, however this wouldn’t work so well with articles in more than one category.
“Those are link count numbers?”
No, those numbers are monthly search engine referrals.
helle, new here
I’d like to get this piece of code, it seems great
[…] As an SEO experiment, a little less than a month ago we 1. Removed all the categories from the sidebar 2. Listed titles of every post with links every page 3. We got rid of the Google Sitemap. […]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Interesting.. hopefully an update with stats in 30 days..