WSN Knowledge Base

Canonical Tags

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 10:05:44 GMT

Canonical tags help tell search engines how to avoid duplicate content on your site. See http://www.canonicaltag.com/ to learn about canonical tags.

WSN uses canonical tags by default. If you wish to turn them off you can do so at Admin Panel -> Settings -> SEO -> "Use Canonical Tags?". Below that there's an additional checkbox option asking if you'd like to have aliased articles and categories point to the original submission in the canonical tag. If you check this box (which is not checked by default) your aliases will no longer appear in search engine indexes. Whether this is desirable or undesirable is a up to you or your SEO consultant to decide.

Blog Ping

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:24:40 GMT

The "blog ping" switch enables pings on each new article added. Once the switch is enabled, you can edit the list of sites to ping at Admin Panel -> Articles -> Article Settings (near bottom of left column). There's a default list of several popular ones.

These pings are normally for blogs. Put simply, a ping notified blog search engines that you have a new entry for them to index. For information about what a ping is, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_(blogging) . For discussion of possible uses in WSN, see www.webmastersite.net/forum...on-new-additions-8840.html

Sitemap

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 09:30:31 GMT

At Admin -> Settings -> Switches, there's a "sitemap" option. When activated, there's a link at the very bottom of every page to a sitemap page which shows all the site's categories and subcategories. This can help search engines find their way to all the subcategories on a site that has thousands.

To customize the look of the sitemap, find the sitemap template at Admin -> Themes -> Manage Templates. The sitemap is pre-generated, once per language, for speed. If it's out of date somehow, Admin -> Maintenance -> Regenerate -> update category selector and sitemap can update it.

This category sitemap is not to be confused with google/sitemaps.org sitemaps, which are an option on the Settings -> SEO page.

Google/Yahoo/MSN Sitemaps

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 11:20:27 GMT

See http://www.sitemaps.org for an explanation of sitemaps, and http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps for google-specific info.

Your SEO settings page allows you to generate sitemaps. You can either do so with a click when you desire or select to have them autogenerated. The generation process is intelligent enough to skip threads if you have comments switched off (or details/comments combined) and skip profiles if you have members switched off.

Please keep in mind that using sitemaps may restrict the number of URLs that will be indexed, for example the virtually-infinite calendar days won't be in the sitemap and any custom pages you make won't be in the sitemap. Which is not to say google won't spider them anyway, but it makes it less likely. Sitemaps are not for every situation, they're only for sites that want to focus spidering on specific important pages alone. But if you have a site with tens of thousands of articles and very few pages currently in google, then you have an ideal candidate for a sitemap.

The option to set priorities lets you decide which pages google should spider first (lower priorites may be skipped if google feels your site isn't worth full indexing). If you want to entirely remove one of the types of pages from your sitemap, set the priority to 0 or blank and it won't be included in the sitemap.

The option for frequency gives search engines an estimate of about how often the page should be expected to update.

The option for extra sitemaps is in case you have custom pages you want indexed. Note that this is only applicable to pages beneth the directory where your installation resides (if other sections of your site are a directory above, the search engines want you to create a seperate specification for that -- or you can let the rest of your site spider the normal way).

Note that autogeneration generates 50 items for every ten page views, so it updates more quickly on a busy site. It doesn't overwrite your old sitemap until it has all the data ready, though, so there's no need to worry about the sitemap being incomplete.

When done generating, your sitemaps index URL to give to search engines will be http://yourdirectory/sitemaps/mapindex.xml in WSN 8.1.0 and later, or http://yourdirectory/sitemaps/mapindex.xml in WSN versions earlier than 8.1.0. Google's submission page is http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps if you want to be able to track errors, but WSN will automatically ping google with a notice of update when the sitemap is regenerated.

Disallowing spiders from non-critical pages

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 03:45:47 GMT

At Admin Panel -> Settings -> SEO you have the option to block spiders from non-critical pages. This serves a dual purpose. First, it saves your server from some pounding it would otherwise take on irrelivent pages (like the "report post" page of each and every comment, the "email article" page of every article and the like). Secondly, it helps spiders get deeper into your site since they aren't drawn off into wild goose chases. If you're seeing 500 months of your site's empty calendar indexed while important pages aren't getting indexed, you may want to use this option.

"Non-critical" means everything except these pages:

any content from index.php (front page, category pages, custom templates)
anything on comments.php that doesn't have action= in it (in other words, the main thread view)
anything on link.php (article details)
anything on memberlist.php (the member list and all member profiles)

URL rewriting is a non-factor, as the urls have been rewritten to their php forms before the determination is made. However, if you have URL rewriting enabled you may prefer to use the option to stop indexing of all non-rewritten URLs (which serves a similar purpose but is less strict, allows more to be indexed).