This has nothing to do with Geeklog. There is nothing to "fix" with this CMS. Beewee gave very valuable hints how to do search engine optimization. You`d need to do that with any other CMS or blog too.

Hi

Yes those tips are really good. But what I mentioned is after my experience with both WP and GL.

Even if I copy a week old artilce from my GL to WP (with a backlink) the WP article is indexed before the GL article and also ranks higher. The GL site in reference has a Google PR3 and the WP site is new with hardly any backlinks and just received a PR2

I am still trying to do all that Beewee and others have mentioned. Lets give it some time, and I will post the results

That is not correct: your pagerank depends of the amount of your backlinks, and the pagerank of your backlinks! This is fully independend of the CMS you are using. You can get a PR9 with a fully bloated site if you can get enough good backlinks. Please learn more about SEO before posting such replies.

I have several Geeklog sites where articles are indexed in 15 minutes sometimes!

Just stick to the basics: use not too many topics, write decent stories with relevant, not too long titles with H1 tags (use not more than 2 or 3 keywords in your title), use 2-3 keywords in the story ID's, use just enough keywords in your stories, also use some relevant subtitles with H2 tags, use nofollow tags for external links if you have to, do not put too much rubbish on your site and only write about the subject your site is about. And: get a lot of relevant backlinks!

The only thing I don't like about Geeklog is the lack of good themes, none of them is really basic and SEO'd. So just follow my advise, find or make a nice SEO'd (WP) theme and port it to GL and you're site will do just fine!

If you want to get indexed on Google News, your story ID has to contain a 5-digit number as well. You can use the date for it: story-about-geeklog-seo-20080702.

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Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

Hey Beewee,

Regarding this comment:



I thought you could only get items in Google News if your site was approved as a publisher? (and I think it is a minimum of a 3 digit number and it must be unique among your stories).

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Yep, you're right, at least 3 digits, but not 4 digits resembling a year (so not 2007, 2008, 2009), and it must be unique. I've always used a SEO story ID + 5 digits from the date of the story, which makes a unique combination and works fine untill now. And yes, you have to submit your site and wait for approval.

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Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

Have you gone through the approval process?

I met most of the criteria except for the one dealing with multiple writers and editors. I didn't initiate the process since, I am the only writer. I understand they do make exceptions sometimes.

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Hi beewee

What i war referring to is that both my sites the one running on GL and WP have content written by me. So the writing styles are same.

Secondly, while the WP site is still v new, it still gets better response from Google. While the GL site which is much older and better linked gets poor response.

I am v sure it is not about the content but other factors. I am trying to accommodate all that you have mentioned on this thread and waiting for it to work.

Thx

That's a common issue, called the Sandbox effect. A newer site gets better SERP's in the beginning, after a few month it's dropping while Google is examining the clicks etcera, and after nearly a year it reaches a more final SERP. You can never compare two sites if their age is not the same.


That was 2 years ago, I cannot remember anything about multiple authors. Why not just try to recommandate your news source over here?

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Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

I noticed Geeklog 1.5 flipped the page titles so the site name comes after the title instead of before. Have you guys notice any improvement in SEO because of this?

For the most part this makes sense to me but I would really like to keep my home page page title the original way with the name of the site first.

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Thanks for the reminder - I had the same thought the other day.

How about this?

Btw, I didn't realize we changed how {page_title} works in 1.5.0 :doh: That was an unfortunate change, but I'd rather not change it back now and cause even more confusion. So I've introduced a new variable ...

bye, Dirk

That looks good.

I'm using 1.4.1 for the moment on a few of my sites so I added a hack to lib-common which if the site slogan is used as a page title (like on the home page, or topics, etc..) it displays after the site name. If a different page title is specified, Geeklog displays it first, followed by the site name.

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.