Todays question was submitted through the survey form. If you would like your question addresseed here you may submit the question there or leave a comment.
Google says that I can stop spiders from indexing a particular page by putting this in the header: How do I put this into a header of a specific page?
Meta commands for robots and robots.txt files are what you are referring to. The problem with WordPress is that there is no easy way to put a specific meta tag on a single page for this. You could do it for the whole blog but doing it for a specific page is not doable at least to my knowledge.
Because the blog pulls different pieces to create the page you see any changes in the theme would be universal not just for a single page.
That being said there are plugins that will allow you to change some of the meta tags like the title and description but I haven’t seen on that allows for the meta tags for Robots.
You could create a robots.txt file and add that page to it as not being crawlable.
If you want to create a robots.txt file you can find a tutorial at Robtstxt.org.
Hope this helps and if you do find a plugin that will allow for this would love to hear about it.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
This is a continuation of yesterdays post. Wanted to go through step by step how to set your feed.
The default option is to send the full feed. If that is what you want you probably won’t have to do anything. If you only want to send a summary follow these steps.
1. Log in to dashboard
2. Click Options
3. Click reading
4. Click the summary box and update
That is all it takes.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed. Throat is still sore so no podcast again. Sorry.
This is another question from the monthly call. Feel free to ask your questions by leaving a comment or using the survey form.
When I write a post and I check it in bloglines or google reader, the full post shows up. What is the incentive for people to come to my blog if they can read the whole post in these blog readers?
This is always a question and the answer will depend on your blog and more importantly on how you monetize your blog.
If you are using contextual advertising like Google Adsense then you should only send out a blurb not the whole post. Obviously no one can click ads in your sidebar if they are only reading your feed.
However, if you are using your blog to review products, educate on a topic or build your credibility then it is probably better to send the full feed. Why make it harder for people to read what you write by forcing them to only use the way you decide. I know from web stats that a great number of my readers do so through some type of feed reader.
Because I am delivering information and building credibility this works for me. Now I have some blogs that are set up differently and on those I send only a summary. They use adsense and cpa ads to generate revenue.
If people don’t visit the actual blog they can’t generate me money. There it is important that I not send a full text feed but force them to the blog if they want to read the complete article.
Tomorrow I will go through how to set the text options for your RSS feed.
As always your questions and comments are appreciated. No podcast today the throat is sore – sorry.
This question comes from one of my monthly Question and Answer sessions.
This answer will be specific to WordPress blogs because different platforms handle this in different ways.
With WordPress it is quite easy to do.
1. Log in to your dashboard.
2. Click options – discussion
3. The second check box down will say
“Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) ”
Make sure that is checked and click update.
That is all that it will take to enable trackbacks on your blog and is set to accept by default.
As always your questions and comments are appreciated.
Can you tell me if Google can read text widgets? If I use a lot of them, and they show up with every page, do those pages get read by google as duplicate content?
Thank you.
Yes Google can and does read what is in the text widget. Let me explain what a text widget is doing.
The widget is adding the content to your sidebar in a dynamic way but the spider sees it and so do you readers the same way as if it was hard coded.
This is the same on any website using php. Php allows you to pull another file into the page when it is displayed and add it to the page as needed. This is usually used for menus and sidebars on any type of website where you want the same piece in all the time (like a header and footer too).
The advantage of this is that you can make changes across the whole website in this piece in one place rather than have to go change each page individually. Change the copyright in the footer (something a lot of us will be doing shortly) and it will change on all the pages from the one file.
This should not be any more of a problem for duplicate content than anything that you hard coded in the side bar.
As always your comments and questions are appreciated.
This question came to me in email. Not the best way to get them to me as it is too easy for them to get overlooked in the sheer volume.
I have posted several times, but I don’t know how to go about pinging. Is it in wordpress? Or do I set up an account somewhere to ping?
Pinging is built in to WordPress. The default is only to ping one service. You can easily get more right from your blog. WordPress Codex has a list of ping sites. To locate it log in to your dashboard – click options – writing.
At the bottom of the page you will see your current ping list and in the text above that section is a link to the listing of ping services at the codex.
You can copy and paste this list into the table and update.
Something to be aware of though. You really need to add a plugin to keep from overpinging. The way the base software is set up every time you publish or edit the software will ping your post.
If you are like me and you check your post, publish, then finally find the typo (guess it comes from being old and bald)you could end up editing the blog right after you post. This can get you listed as a spammer at the ping sites and they will deny your ping.
The one I like is old but does not cause intermittent problems on the new 2.3 version of WordPress is Smart Update Pinger. Even though it hasn’t been updated for a bit it works fine at this point and hopefully some talented programmer will adopt it.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
This question was emailed t me after the monthly call. It is not a good way to get questions to me as they can easily be missed due to sheer volume of email I receive daily.
I have a question. Plug ins. How do you get them? What are they, exactly? How do you use them?
Well to define them I went to Wikipedia for a definition.
“A plugin (plug-in, addin, add-in, addon or add-on) sometimes also called extension (see below), is a computer program that interacts with a host application (a web browser or an email client, for example) to provide a certain, usually very specific, function “on demand”. Applications support plugins for many reasons. Some of the main reasons include: enabling third-party developers to create capabilities to extend an application, to support features yet unforeseen, reducing the size of an application, and separating source code from an application because of incompatible software licenses.”
In plain english they are actually an add on program to enhance an existing program. (At least for the plugins we discuss for WordPress)
Finding a plugin can be relatively easy. I usually start at Google. Type in function I am looking for and add wordpress plugin to it. (ex. flickr wordpress plugin – would allow me to find available plugins to integrate Flickr into my blog.) You then go to the results and can usually either download or purchase the plugin. (Not all but most are free.)
To make them work if they have been written for WordPress is usually, but not always easy. First you will need to unzip the file. Check for a readme.txt file and actually read it. 99% of the time this will tell you exactly how to use it.
Upload the appropriate files or folder to the plugin directory (youdomain/folderblogisin/wp-content/plugins). Log in to your dashboard and click the plugin option then activate the plugin.
The last step is to click options and the link for that plugin and make any adjustments or additions required for the plugin. (You did read the readme file right?).
That will take care of most plugin installations but some need to integrate with the theme so you may need to do some editing there before it will actually do its job.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed. You can leave questions in the comments or use the survey form at the top.
