Do you want to increase your Google rankings? I have discovered an easy way to get your self hosted Wordpress blog and posts a better ranking in Google. A self hosted Wordpress blog can consists of hundreds, if not thousands of individual posts and pages. Google is standing by to rank every one of them. All you have to do is control that robot!
Robot control is a little bit like traffic control. With traffic control you have stop signs, traffic lights and crossing guards that control automobiles on the streets. On the Internet instead of their being cars that travel throughout your blog there are people and their are robots. Controlling people and robots on the Internet and within your site is actually much easier than control cars on the streets. In the real world, there are many different street signs that you need to recognize and understand before you can safely drive on the streets.
Traffic Control In The Real World
In order to be a safe driver on the streets you have to know what stop signs mean, you have to understand what Yield, Merge and Dead End stand for. If you don't understand the signs and the commands you could cause an accident and get yourself including other drivers seriously injured and even killed. Driving on the road without understanding the rules of the road is dangerous. To understand all the rules takes time. You have to to study the driving book and gain actual experience. Luckily for you, understanding how to control people and robots on the Internet is much easier and less risky if you have a failed attempt!
Traffic Control In The Internet World
There are two elements that can be controlled on the Internet. People and robots. Generally speaking, most bloggers already know how to control and direct people on their blogs. This is done by placing emphasis on their certain sections within their blogs or putting various other things in the spotlight for their visitors and readers to see. What is not apparent is there is actually two versions of your blog. You have the graphical and pretty version that people see. And you have the coded and text based version that robots see. Moreover, in the version that the robots see, the order of your importance that is visible to people in most cases will be different than what the robots see. In other words, if you place top value on your category section on the graphical side, this section might actually be presented to robots mid way down and possibly even last, or even not at all.
The Robots.txt File
The solution to coaching robots along the right paths is to create a robots.txt file. This file actually has many uses and over the span of the next few weeks, I am going to show you all the functions of a robots.txt file. However, for the time being, I will explain how the robots.txt file helps with controlling robot traffic.
Controlling robot traffic is much easier than controlling street traffic. The only two commands you need to memorize are allow and disallow. In other words, on your robots.txt file, you specifically tell robots where they are allowed to visit and where they are not. Generally speaking, it is as simple as that.
If you run a self hosted Wordpress blog, you can create a robots.txt file and upload it into your root directory. A simple version of this file can give instructions to robots that tell them where they are not allowed to enter. See example:
In this example, I am telling all robots NOT to access these various folders shown. For example, I don't want robots entering and indexing content within my /feed directory. The reason why I don't robots to access this directory is because my content is already available in my category directory. When I purposely ban robots from accessing sections of my site that produce duplicate entries of my content, I am able to direct them to the sections that are important to me. This is very much needed when you want to assure that you are putting forth as much focus on your sections for both people and robots.
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