I recently submitted my blog to BlogDistributor to try them out. After waiting for the site to be reviewed, I got back a noticed saying to resubmit when I fix the issue of the fact my articles do not all display full posts and only display excerpts from the front page. The reasoning behind the decision is because it was not good for search engines. (I was also suggested to use themes from known unsafe free WordPress theme sites to download in the case that I was not able to code.)
WHAT?!?!
Where is that little piece of information on the net? Seems fine and dandy to me to display excerpts. Some of the top blogs on SEO use excerpts to display posts and it is not hurting them one bit. Search Engine Journal does it, Joost de Valk does it at Yoast, and even the SEOmoz blog does it.
The whole work is within the site layout, and the content itself to build SEO. It does not really matter if your site displays full posts or excerpts because it is ALL read by the search engine. And because of social networking, and RSS, it makes it easy for people to bypass your layout and go straight to he content itself.
However, I have never had an issue with this with Pay Per Post or SocialSpark, so why is this a reason? I am not changing my site, so I am not sure why this is even an issue because I know it really does not matter.
So, I am wondering if people are not being given the right information or are we all still wrong?
What is the correct way to display your posts on your front page?
I selected a theme that allows me to display hand-written excerpt on front page. This has two benefits:
1. You can write short piece of text so as to tempt front page readers to compel them enter into the post and go through the original post. This will be something similar to the announcer who describes a bit and invites the speaker to put forward her speech.
2. Search engines are developing more and more aggressive against duplicate content. If I publish full content on my home page, the post page too will have same text. This is something undesirable. That's why, it is better if you do not replicate the blocks of text.
I am not SEO expert though, I wished to share what I learned and believed. Please excuse me if I'm wrong!
My recent post Which is the best WordPress theme?
A lot of themes allow you to do this. It is in the default for WordPress and you can even do that using All In One or Headspace.
Showing your post on the front for a full article along with several just means that single article was called to the page with php functions… and nothing to do with duplicate content. If you post another page on your site or elsewhere with virtually the same content, then that would be when you would have to worry about duplicate content. 😀 Search engines are well aware of this and document your individual articles… because your front page will always have updated content.
Kind of like in Twitter. Each user has their own RSS feed, and the search engines are not documenting the front page of your Twitter profile except for mainly the URL, your username, and your description. Then, they document your individual tweets. This is because your front page has frequently updating content. It is better to document the new tweets rather than constantly documenting your front page unless you change your personal description and username.
It works the same for your website.
Sounds understandable?
It's definitely strange that they won't accept your submission just because you don't show the full excerpt of your posts on the front page. I don't either and I will keep it that way. I don't think that it makes a difference because with a blog you are not trying to rank with your homepage but rather with your individual posts.
I thought it was too and the reasoning just set me off because I have been web designing for over 7 years and try my best to follow some of the SEO advice out there. I had never heard of that and had to go check my favorite sites that do talk about SEO to make sure I had not gone crazy.
I say display teasers with theh pictures as that's what gets the visitor eyeballs anyway. One single long post on the first page looks too dull to me!
My recent post 7 Benefits of Personal Branding for Solopreneurs and Self-Employed
I agree, it does look dull… and showing full posts sometimes can be overwhelming depending on how many posts you want to show and how long they are.
People use excerpts to help prevent reposting of the full article on some spam blog. That way, when blogs import your post, they only import part and the reader would have to go to your blog to read the whole thing.
My recent post Marketing 101
This attitude from BlogDistributor made me say EWWWW! Do you think it was loud enough they heard it? Doubtful but we can hope.
Excerpts are helpful for a number of reasons including minimizing duplicate content. However I think they may have less usefulness when a purely SEO site that is using SEO and PPC traffic is concerned.
For those of us that do a combination of SEO, social media and organic blogger traffic, excerpts help us draw the reader off of the front page, onto the post page with all of the syndication tools and comment section. When I left my first post fully visible on the home page (which then requires a click-through to go comment) my comment rates fell drastically. Definitely NOT something most of us desire. However comments themselves can lower the keyword density of a page (yay for SEO Smart Comments and other solutions) and are considered to some to be detrimental to SEO.
So I guess what I'm rambling around saying (LOL!) is that it really depends on the goal of the site what approach is best at the end of the day. Shame on BlogDistributor for not understanding that.
My recent post Facebook Fan Pages vs Facebook Groups
I have my posts displayed on the sidebar..although I must say Excerpts hold the site-visitors attention a lot more than Teasers do…
Nicole,
Best SEO Software – Guaranteed Top 10 Google Rankings
For those of us that do a combination of SEO, social media and organic blogger traffic, excerpts help us draw the reader off of the front page, onto the post page with all of the syndication tools and comment section. When I left my first post fully visible on the home page (which then requires a click-through to go comment) my comment rates fell drastically. Definitely NOT something most of us desire. However comments themselves can lower the keyword density of a page (yay for SEO Smart Comments and other solutions) and are considered to some to be detrimental to SEO.
Great post. Thanks for posting.
Great article Nile.
I am trying so hard to get search traffic on my blog and make it more SEO friendly . Thank you for hsaring these tips. I will definitely apple these tricks.