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Avoiding Infinite Loops

Making your blog less noisy by avoiding the infinite loop

Webmasters are often concerned with duplicate content; Matt Cutts @ Google posted snippets from Google’s Press Day 2006 today in his blog. They talked about the Infinite Loop and Duplicate Content which is very common in blogs.

Alan Eustace is up. He’s our Senior VP of Engineering, so he doesn’t have to wear a suit. Cool, Alan’s going to walk through the life of a query! He runs through the need to crawl, index, and then score relevant results. “Speed matters.” With 8 billion pages, it would take 253 years (I think I got that right) to fetch pages if you fetch one page per second. “It’s important that we gently crawl the web at very high speeds.” Alan talks about duplicate pages, which can vary from 30-50% of pages with a naive approach. Alan notes that you have to avoid infinite loops such as calendars. Freshness matters. Size matters, especially with long-tail queries.

So how can we help the search engine bots get through our blogs gentle and quick? Do all the noisy attributes of a Wordpress blog make it not search engine friendly? Having a calendar in your sidebar is extremely noisy and even the monthly archives could be seen as duplicate correct? Do people actually use archives and calendars? My stats tell me they do not so why not remove them?

To make Wordpress less noisy I am removing the calendar, archives and replacing them with a “sitemap”. Yes you can put a rel=”nofollow” to these areas so Google will ignore them but what about Yahoo and MSN?

Here is my Optimizing Wordpress category where I will show you how to remove and replace features in Wordpress.

Posted by admin 10.May.06

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