WordPress is a unique platform which delivers up to date open source benefits in an easy to master, user-friendly way. The advantages of WordPress (or any other open source content management system) is there for everyone to make use of but beware- some plugins and widgets will bite when it comes to SEO.
Standard with WordPress, mainly because of it’s blogging origins, is the tags or tagging facility. A page or post can be assigned a tag which helps to group pages of a similar topic or subject matter. Tags have been used for SEO for many years, with optimisers choosing to utilise the extra landing pages created by adding multiple tags to a blog with plenty of content.
In recent times tagging has become much more of a consideration for optimisation purposes, especially with Google. The search giant has been making frequent updates to the ‘Google Algorithm’, the criteria with which they rank a page in the search results.
Duplicate content is the buzz word with Google, as the recent Panda update confirmed for many website owners. A number of high profile websites were hurt severely in the SERP’s, witnessing a big drop across all their internal and home page rankings. This is a direct result of having little or no original content within their pages.
The fact of the matter is, you now need to be looking at 95% original content or more, as the future looks even more certain to include extra changes to the algorithm combatting content plagiarism.
The scenario with tags follows the same rule set- if you have numerous tag landing pages, listing snippets of other pages within your site, their is little or no original content for the search engines to discover. Instead Google see’s this as a ‘spammy’ way of attacking multiple phrases without doing the work yourself. Put simply, if you want to rank for a keyword, each one needs it’s own post or page.
So what recommendations would we put forward to a company wanting to use tags as part of their navigation and site content? A noindex rule for the tag landing pages, nofollow in place for the tag listings at the bottom of posts / pages, and a nofollow on tag clouds as well. We would also recommend only using about 8-10 tags in a cloud widget, so as not to hurt the text to links ratio on the web-page.
There are seemingly a million different add-ons to the functionality of WordPress, Joomla, Magento and Drupal. All offer instant access to on-going improvements, and means costly development is reduced massively. In fact in many cases it’s just the cost of installation of an extension (as in the case with Magento, some extensions costing up to £200). Many WordPress plugins and themes are free.
The only real problem from a SEO point of view is the on-page elements can be effected. The code that is used for a sidebar widget, if not checked, can be messy and hurt the code to text ratio on the page as well. Also titles on sidebar widgets are often header tags (or H tags, such as H1, H2 etc). This can detract from the overall page theme, hurting search engine positions.
