genesis domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /sites/petermahoney.net/files/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6121Peter Mahoney, 25+ Years Search Strategist
Good feedback:
Once again Peter was superb and no doubt I’ll be using his services many more times. Most definitely I would recommend using him when you have any WordPress related issue.
I’m not very good at tooting my own horn, but for the record, there are over 1,000 reviews of my service floating around on the internet, an 998 of those are 5-star feedbacks.
I’ve been doing website development since 1995, and SEO since 1998. Even according to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, that makes me an expert in both areas a few times over.
I just had a moment this morning that reminded myself just how experienced I am what I do. One client signed up for my monthly SEO service a few weeks ago. Normally it’s a month before I issue the first update but I do like to keep an eye on how things are going and check the data fairly regularly.
So when he wrote to ask how things were progressing I was very happy to be able to send him this graph, showing the number of times his site was seen in Google search results over the past 90 days, with a crudely drawn arrow indicating when he started working with me.
So how good am I? Very good. I’m just not always very good at telling you about it.
However, this post isn’t commenting on piracy as a topic, rather Ann’s own comment that a Google search for Netflix’s House of Cards (another very popular TV program) doesn’t even bring up the official site in the top 50 results.
On the surface, she’s saying “look at all the piracy sites that come before the proper one!”, but behind that is the idea that by default, the official site for anything should come top. The problem is, Netflix’s site for House of Cards has terrible SEO, that’s why it performs so poorly.
There’s not nearly enough textual content, and the meta tags are actually about Netflix, not the show, and therefore they score very poorly for relevancy (how many words in the tags also appear on the page) which is likely to have them penalised by Google, not shoved higher up the rankings.
This serves as an excellent cautionary tale. Just because you feel you deserve to be in the top spot, doesn’t mean you will be. If other people are writing about your industry, product or service, and do it better than you do—they will beat you in the rankings.
If you care about your position, invest in some proper, industry-leading SEO—and get where you want to be.
Using WordPress you’ll usually find this on each page and post in the Dashboard, in the settings for whichever SEO Plugin you use (All In One SEO pack, Yoast, etc.).
Most other content management systems will have their own setting, or if your site is totally bespoke you can add this to the code in the <head> section:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />
There are many reasons actually, but the most common is duplicate content. If you have two pages on your site that have similar content, you want to mark one as noindex so it doesn’t appear as though you’ve stuffed your site with multiple copies of the same thing.
Google and the other major engines see duplicate content as an attempt to make your site look fuller than it really is, or to have stolen content from elsewhere to try to fill your site up quickly, without much thought, and very little originality.
The other time to definitely use nofollow is if you have used a significant portion of content from another site. Sometimes there is a legitimate reason to grab content from elsewhere and publish it yourself, but you should always stop it from being indexed.
Now, before you get too excited and think “I’m fine, I’ve not got anything on my site that exists elsewhere at all”, let me ask you about your Terms and Conditions. Did you have those written from scratch? Or are they standardised, lifted from another site, or based on a template?
noindex them. Even though they’re just the legal bits, you don’t want Google to have any reason to think your site has a predilection toward duplicate content.
David Burnett from Image Control Photography wanted an update for his site, which was based on a very well-known (but it turns out not cross-browser compatible) WordPress theme. He works in the hotly contested wedding photography market, and needed to stand out from the crowd.
I made one myself that is a lot more dependable than the one he bought off-the-shelf.
Obviously, I’m more of a red and black person and the colour scheme might not be to my personal tastes—but everything is well laid out, easy to read, fully responsive (even on Windows Mobile IE) and has a good mix of high quality photography with text.
I’m going to have a glass of wine to celebrate this one.
It’s updated to be fully responsive and looks great on portable devices like mobiles and tablets, and I like to think it’s well laid out and easy to use.
It’s actually been up for a few days as a trial, and within 24 hours I had a compliment from someone who had just come across my site for the first time, and said they found it easy to use and navigate.
What do you think?
(Oh yes, I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that I can make you a site just as awesome—ask me how.)
