Are your rankings leaking out through your links? Every link that you have on a page is a potential leak unless you use the “nofollow” command to prevent search engines from following those links away from your site. Of course you want to link to the important pages on your site including your blog, but there are other necessary pages that don’t provide any additional information. For example:
- Login/Register/Sign up/Contact: These are functional pages that don’t add content.
- RSS feeds: You want search engines to see the original post, not the duplicate content.
- Tags/Archives/Category pages: Again, these are copies of your original blog.
- Copyright/Privacy: Who comes to your site to read this?
Also, be aware of the anchor text that many blogs automatically write for you. If your blog is about “New Financing Guidelines” make sure you use that as your anchor text and not “read more,” “click here,” or “old posts.” These don’t tell the search engines what your blog is about.
