Geeklog Forums

@winnerdk

Have you modified Geeklog? Anything for seo? any submissions / ping etc for google??
Wordpress has similar magic for me (iphonehelp .in), but somehow this ones on onlygizmos .com isnt working ...

Honestly, I've done everything I can find to make my Geeklog site as SEO friendly as possible.

In short, I've done everything I can think of or find, anywhere.

For the most part, all of the efforts or changes I've done are documented in the Forum posts over the years. I don't know if any one thing has had a greater or substantial impact, or if rather the success has been due to a compilation of all of those efforts.

"Tweaking Geeklog for SEO" should be a WIKI somewhere. I've gotten the impression over the years that the real geeks behind Geeklog (Dirk) don't care as much about SEO as I do, and I think they are just a little out of step with the wants and needs of us regular (not so geeky) users, who care very much about SEO issues.

In fact, at one point I was almost ready to abandon Geeklog as a CMS, exactly because it was so SEO unfriendly. But, I managed to make a few dozen little fixes to overcome the limitations. With the help of guys like Dirk, of course.

Now, my site is about as SEO friendly as it gets. And if I learn of or find anything else that will make it more SEO friendly, then I will implement those changes immediately.

Don, staying faithful to GL, looking forward to versions 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, etc. http://www.panama-guide.com

Don, I just noticed that whats getting indexed in your site is the Printer Version.
http://www.panama-guide.com/article.php/20080603093725217/print


And i was just wondering if the sites theme makes a difference to it!??

Actually, if you will notice - there's no question mark in that URL - therefore Google sees (and loves) all of those print URL's, which are produced with every article. Double the content, double the fun.

The search engines should also be seeing the primary URL, which also do not contain any question marks.

For example: http://www.panama-guide.com/article.php/200806011621391

Getting rid of those question marks did wonders from an SEO perspective. Major hang-up for Google.

Don
http://www.panama-guide.com

At the time of your posting, "google.com" was yet again blacklisted by SLV. I've also seen a lot of test spam using plain http://google.com over the last days.

FWIW, your panama-guide URL is already in the SLV whitelist here ...

bye, Dirk

Don't forget to block the print versions in robots.txt!

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

@ Don: I have done all that i could for SEO. Check on onlygizmos .com . Will do through the forums to see what else can be changed. Can you suggest a few? Or probably post a few links?

I have also blocked /print in robots.txt recently. But not sure if it will really work. need to wait for google to index again.

This is how my robots file looks

User-agent: *
Disallow: /docs
Disallow: /pingback.php
Disallow: /submit.php
Disallow: /trackback.php

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: Disallow: /print$

I've been doing the SEO game for a while now and here are few things I have learned over the years.

The most important thing for your geeklog site is original content. Take a look at sites like http://www.macosxhints.com/ and http://www.groklaw.net/. These are two large and popular geeklog sites that don't do much SEO yet they rank very high.

The second important thing is people linking to your site. The best way to get this done is publish original content and ping the popular services that track this stuff when you post anything new. The other thing that helps here is RSS feeds. Make sure you have one setup and use Feedburner to monitor it. Google owns Feedburner so it is a good source of information for them.

Other important things include keywords in your domain name, Page Titles (which staticpages and stories handle well) and keywords in the URL. A great spot to put this in is the id of the story or staticpage. Don't stuff these spots with keywords, use just the most important ones. I mainly just reuse the title of the post here.


Things I don't worry to much about:

URL Rewrite. I did worry about this at first but not much anymore. I've done several tests on sites (for several months) and notice no improvements when enabled.

Duplicate Content. See Google SPAM Guru Matt Cutts
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/duplicate-content-question/

Matts blog is a great resource his latest post mentions Meta descriptions as well. I haven't done much research into Meta descriptions since dynamic ones aren't possible in geeklog.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/improved-seo-documentation-galore/

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Here is a more informative post on meta descriptions and what google looks for (from the Google web master blog).

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/improve-snippets-with-meta-description.html

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Don,

I tried a lot of things

1. URL rewrite (from config.php)
2. Making story titles link to the story on the homepage
3. Meta on home page and dynamic on story pages
4. Giving the title text as ID for URL


Any more suggestions?

Ok I checked that; WP uses the same Pingomatic like Geeklog. No change.
And out friend www.panama-guide.com is enjoying indexing almost instantly, so I am still trying to figure out where is the catch.

Increasing the no of articles on hompage cannot be the solution as my another WP bases site iphonehelp.in get indexed instantly (hosted on same server as my geeklog site)

I just love geeklog and the whole cms .. also the blocks system and the theme, not willing to shift to any other cms...

Sunny

I am unable to block it by robots, please share the settings...

Meantime I am adding the noindex meta to print pages...

You don't just have to ping Pingomatic, you can ping Google and other sites like Technorati directly.

Do you have an account at Google Webmaster Tools? They will usually tell you if anything is wrong with your site.

---

One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Yes I am active with Google Webmasters.

The recent two problems I faced was of DUPLICATE META

1. The pages with story=? and the new rewritten URL's are seen as differnet pages and hence duplicate. Is there anyway to redirect all those? pages to the normal ones?

2. The PRINT pages are being highlighted as duplicate. I have added noindex tab in the meta. Should take effect soon. But need more advice on robots.txt to restrict indexing of print pages.

Regards

I Do ping Google BlogSearch.

Any way to PING Google Search?

Which other sites shall i ping (other than Pingomatic and Google Blog search)

Rgds
Sunny

You could ping Technorati and Feedburner. There is no way to ping Google search.

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Hi Technorati and Feedburner are both in pingomatic right?

@ winnerdk:
- in most of you stories you're imediately linking to anothe site. Don't do that, your losing linkjuice with that. Make them at least nofollow links.

- you're making duplicate content: in the sideblock there's an URL http://www.panama-guide.com/crime, and in the fly-out menu there's http://www.panama-guide.com/index.php?topic=crime.... with all the topics...

- you're using too many topics. About ten is the max. If you ned more, use the tags plugin to focus and link with keywords only (with the risk of duplicate content)

- my experience you better not use url_rewrite for topics, since the paging still uses /index.php?topic=**&page=2 so that's duplicate content again since Google also likes to follow only the first part of /index.php?topic=**&page=2, which is /index.php?topic=** ...

- using url_rewrite for topics also will lower the ranking of the homepage and stories. And you should see that the homepage and stories are the best ranking pages since the topic pages change constantly (paging).

-use descriptive story titles with 2 or 3 keywords and not too much "garbage", and use these also in the story ID.

- "Add this article to any online bookmarking service": make these no-follow links, you're losing linkjuice in every story again!

- You're link to this in your fly-out menu, the not rewritten url, so duplicate content again: http://www.panama-guide.com/article.php?story=20061007084736160

- In the fly-out menu the Home link leads to /index.php. Skip that, link to /

- Make the links to "Post a comment" also nofollow.

- Skip directory.php, that's pure bogus for SEO, or block it in robots.txt.

- Read real SEO blogs like the one from Matt Cutts, or http://yoast.com/ and http://www.pearsonified.com/

- Start getting more backlinks. Not too many in a short time, and try to get some with a nice anchortext and linking to a story or topic (if you've decided which url to use...)

- Make the /print links and all other unimportant links nofollow.

- Give the Read More some kind of descriptive anchortext with a href="**" "title="{story-title}"

Well, you see, in ten minutes there are lots of thing found you can improve. But firtst of all: stick to the basic. Everything you change on your site which changes or duplicates the content radically is mostly wrong and overkill.

A basic built Geeklog site is not that bad for seo. All you need is a really good SEO theme (I know, there isn't anyone for GL at the moment) with a very simple and lean & clean semantic source. The CMS is good enough, I can tell you.

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

So is Google, but if you want your stories in the search result faster it is better to ping the source directly.

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

I have been working hard to find out ways to get things better with GL. But its getting frustrating.

GL is the best CMS i have come across. Its V good in certain things, and frankly i am addicted to an extent.

But see this: Articles that i post on my WP site get indexed within 9-10 hrs. And it takes 5-6 days or more of GL articles to get indexed ...

I have seen this trend with many GL site owners. And only Don (Panama-Guide) seems to have managed to get it working, after a lot of hard work.

But is it worth it to spend so much time to fix the CMS, that much time and effort would better be spent on content and other things for the site ...

There is certainly something that we are missing, I am just not able to figure out what is that magic in WP!!