Blog Architecture all wrong?
Well, we've started late to this blogging game. We felt that a lot of what we are wanting to say has already been said. It also seems that, while blogs are great sources of good, relevant content, a lot of it has been done before. I don't need any more "Top 10 ways to get ranked in (Search engine: fill in the blank)!"
Aside from the problems of having unique and interesting content, I notice that most blogs have inherent information architecture problems. While they are fantastic publishing tools, there is some customization that needs to be done with them so that:
- They are more user friendly.
- They avoid duplicate content issues.
- Good (read popular) content is more easily found.
I was talking with my friend Deane about this article and he subsequently wrote a good post echoing it. I think it needs to be said again and, hopefully, I'm not contradicting myself by reinventing any wheels. I'll try and break down what I see as the core problem(s) with blog architecture and speak to some of the SEO issues hindering blogs.
Date Archives
For bloggers that are posting multiple times a day in different categories, it seems appropriate for visitors to see the most recent posts by date. If a search tool is not finding what they need, perhaps an old article they are trying to dig up, then if they know the date (approximately) then they can find it this way. However, for corporate blogs or blogs that are not updated as frequently, it is confusing and redundant. Yearly, Monthly, Weekly, Daily. It’s all a bit much.
If the date archives are necessary, having entire posts listed in, for example, Yearly, Monthly, the front page (for newer posts) and the actual post page—4 pages with the same content—will severely hinder the blog’s content from ranking well.
Fix: Make sure to use a "Read More" or :Continue reading: Name of article" (better anchor text with the latter) tag to truncate posts. Blogs with full posts on the front page are hard to scan, since visitors must scroll through entire articles to get to the next. A brief summary would give the visitor a good overview, and search engines wouldn’t tag the content as duplicate.
For WordPress users, there is a great SEO plugin that will allow you clear up a lot of the problems with blogs. Along with sorting out some of the IA problems, it will allow you to customize Titles and Meta Descriptions, and let your tags populate as your meta keywords. Some people are fussy about adding a <nofollow> to category pages, suggesting that it is a source of PageRank drain. This plug-in has the ability to add a <nofollow> to these pages. Slick.
Category Archives & Tag Categories
Whats the difference? When you you tag something, isn’t that categorizing it? We’ve gone the route of tags being the category and it seems to be working well (so far). Once we have more articles, we’ll see how many tags/categories we have and we may need to purge or amalgamate some of them in order to keep things user friendly.
Secondly, we have the same problem here as on the front page—full page content which makes it hard to navigate and, again, counts as duplicate content. Truncating the post and limiting it to a certain number of characters will make it easier to scan and will eliminate the duplicate content issues. I have seen some category pages with just the links listed with the date beside them and this is a very fast way to scan the links and find the old article you were looking for. Then again, you could just SEARCH for all of this, couldn’t you?
Our top content is buried!
Another way that blogs suffer is that they operate in reverse chronological order – the newest posts are first and the oldest posts are buried in places like archives and at the bottom of category (or tag) pages. What about your BEST content? The posts that generated a lot of buzz. The posts that were syndicate frequently, or have links to/from the most external sources? Shouldn’t they count as an important navigation area to your site? Adding a “Top Posts” area to your blog is a great way show your mettle. Also, from an SEO prospective, links to your good content from the native navigation of the important pages on your site contribute to a better link structure.
There are lots of different plugins for this sort of thing, but I’ve used this on a number of blogs we’ve helped integrate and, with a bit of work, you can make it highlight the posts you want highlighted.
