5 replies to this topic

[Andy1342]

I want to add a blog to my site, with SEO a main goal. Following advice on these pages I installed Wordpress. I havn't blogged even my very first post, and already I regret it.

Between installing and making my first post, Wordpress upgraded to 2.8.6. Of course I installed the upgrade. Immediately the blog pages fell over and stopped loading in any browser, so now I have already a couple of hours, and more in sight, of technical agony to fix this. I do not need more technical hassles! (Just today Wordpress 2.9 has come out, I'll see if that fixes things.)

My questions:
(1) is there a simpler / more robust alternative to Wordpress to create a simple blog on my site?
(2) since a main goal of the blog is SEO, I assume - but is it true? - that I need to have the blog actually part of my site, so that inlinks to the blog are automatically inlinks to the site. IE it would eliminate the technical problems to host the blog on wordpress.com, but, would that reduce the SEO benefit of the inlinks I garner? At the least I would have to create links from the blog to my site to pass the benefit on.
(3) OR, is there actually benefit to playing games with links from the site to the blog? Some of my competitors seem to do great, SEO wise, with hundred of not-quite-spam but third quality links to their site from every page of their blogs.

Many thanks for any guidance on these points!

Regards

Andy

[Jill]

(1) is there a simpler / more robust alternative to Wordpress to create a simple blog on my site?

WP is actually very simple and robust once you have it all installed and working correctly.

(2) since a main goal of the blog is SEO, I assume - but is it true?

Not really. It's to provide information/advice or whatever to your target market.

IE it would eliminate the technical problems to host the blog on wordpress.com, but, would that reduce the SEO benefit of the inlinks I garner?

No, but it would be less professional and you'd be kinda stuck there, plus they would pretty much own it.

OR, is there actually benefit to playing games with links from the site to the blog? Some of my competitors seem to do great, SEO wise, with hundred of not-quite-spam but third quality links to their site from every page of their blogs.

You don't want to play games with anything. Just do what makes the most sense to you as a business. Links are links. They are measured for ranking purposes by how useful/popular the page they're on is.

[Andy1342]

Hi Jill,
Many thanks, I'll persist with Wordpress.

Re the playing games - believe me, I don't WANT to play games. I really truely don't, and I don't intend to start. That is why it is to this forum that I come for SEO advice.

But in my neck of the woods, relatively non-competitive by international internet terms, the awful thing is that it looks like playing games works. When I look at the sites of some of my competitors, they have much less good, solid content than me, and not really better links. What they have is a ton of keywords on their pages, not quite spam but not quite not-spam either, and a ton of not-quite-spam inlinks. And Google seems to like this just fine!

For example, one of my competitors has a personal site with photographs he has taken. Every page of that site has a hidden link to his professional site. All those links show up in Yahoo Site Explorer, along with hundreds - a couple of thousand - other links from local maps, directories, and Ecademy, linkedn and such like. Almost none of these links is a genuine endorsement of his site, but his SEO results are very good. My conclusion is that Google may like white hat and actively dislike black hat, but can be easily fooled by high-volume grey hat. I don't like it, but I can't account for my competitors results any other way.

Regards

Andy

[Jill]

You can always report them to Google, if you are so inclined. May not do anything but might make you feel better.

Unfortunately, while Google talks the talk, they don't always walk the walk.

[Andy1342]

[quote name='Jill' date='Dec 20 2009, 10:23 PM' post='306425']
WP is actually very simple and robust once you have it all installed and working correctly.



Hi Jill,
I have to say, the "once you have it all installed and working correctly" is just too much of a hurdle. Wordpress is a nightmare. I made another post about it overloading my server and when I look into this, I find there is a whole nightmare network of branching threads in their support forums about server overload and what to do about it. Answer: No-one seems to know!

No, I've had it with Wordpress. Back to my original question: can anyone recommend a simple, more robust and server-friendly blog?

Regards
Andy

[Jill]

All I can say is I've never had any problems it and I'm not a server geek or anything. Seems like perhaps you need to pay someone to set yours up correctly perhaps?