For those of you returning to the site today, many of you may notice that some changes have been made. First, I have decided to change the blog back to a more traditional format. Secondly, I have now added language support (thanks to Davide Pozza’s Global Translator plugin) for over 40 languages. Now, these may sound like fairly minor changes but I am going to show you how much of an impact these two changes can have on SEO.
First, I have never like the traditional blog format much, I have always thought that it provides too much information when all I am going to read is a headline and maybe the first sentence when looking for something specific. I don’t like having to scroll down a page to see all of the important information on it. The truth is that search engines, specifically Bing, might feel differently.
The word around the SEO campfire is that the old axiom “content is king” is as true now as ever with Bing. We are finding that Bing is determining pagerank more heavily by the page content than by on-page SEO practices like linking, title tags, and backlinks. Therefore, I am testing the idea of having more content visible on the homepage by displaying more of the copy from the articles than the layout did previously.
As for the better SEO practices related to translation we need to keep our eye on a few things. Primarily, when you translate a page does the URL change? If the answer is yes, you may run into the problem of search engines indexing duplicate content on your site. In the past this has been a big issue up until several months ago when the three major search engines decided to all agree on what we now call the Canonical tag. You can view this tag by checking the source code of any of the pages on this blog. Mine are generated dynamically by the Wordpress All in One SEO Pack which handles this and few other things for me. There is also another plugin that just does the canonical tag called Canonical URL’s.
If you haven’t read up on the proper usage of canonical tags yet or have questions on their usage, I recommend viewing the the interview below with search expert Matt Cutts or checking out his blog post on the subject.
