[Patrick]

Initial Effort, on 12 January 2012 - 09:57, said:

Just as a note....and I didn't really mention this in the other thread, but some aged domains are penalized by Google which causes them not to rank. This is rarely the case, but if you aren't seeing a site in the top 500-1000 either you aren't building enough links, not enough time as gone by for the links to be found, or google has decided not to rank the site based on the previous owner.

Thanks for getting involved ie. It's one of the 2 options above. The site is ranking for the em but not for keyword that I want it too. I've only built around 10-15 links though. Given a little time I think it'll turn around.

[Patrick]

Just done some checking and I had the standard template installed on my worpdress blog. This meant the the author page and category pagae were getting indexed whcih are essentially the same. I've installed meta seo pack which add's "no index" tags to these pages. It's a good plugin.

[Initial Effort]

Yes, that is a huge problem I am finding with websites that we try to rank. The author, category, comment, tag, etc pages get indexed by google creating similar onpage/duplicate onpage content. So a person's site seems to rank just fine for a little bit and then they build more links and/or Google evaluates their website again and then penalizes them. The length of this penalty is indefinite.

[Patrick]

Apologies for the delay in my reply. I had my first child last month and updating my forum experiment slipped down my importance list.

Initial effort is right. Unless you use a SEO optimised template you can have real trouble ranking a wordpress site. I've now stripped out all of the duplicate content pages. I've gone as far as removing the author and cat pages altogether. Tracking down the links for  Now there's just posts on the sites. The sites are now in #38 for kw2 and #51 for kw1.  I've bought a few backlinks for kw1 but the 2.0 properties aren't built yet. The web 2.0 properties are in the process of getting built for kw2 however and it seems to be reacting well. Hopefully we'll see a few more position rises.

At this point I'm not sure when I'll start buying the links. I was hoping to get near or on the first page before I did. I've also thought about using synnd for some social media back links. this would be a break from the strategy, but I think as I get closer to #1 I'll be ithcing to through everything but the kitchen sink at it. We shall see....

[MattW]

I have had no problem ranking wordpress sites with the default theme and leaving the category, tag, author pages indexed.  I dont think it is as big of an issue as people make out personally.

[Patrick]

I'm sure that every rule has an exception. But having repeat content on your site is bad.

In this case study once I moved to wordpress the sites disappeared. I did a "site:" search and found Author and Category pages indexed and displaying identical information. I removed these pages and the sates are now ranking again. Removing repeat content had the effect of improving my rank positions drastically. If I wear a newbie I might have given up once the sites disappeared. Thankfully I've been dealt blows by big "G" before so I stuck at it.

At no point in the future will I make this mistake again. Not worth taking any chances on repeat content.

[Patrick]

Good news kw 1 mad a big jump over the last few days. Now at the bottom of page 2. Almost time to buy links. Hopefully I can hold out until I'm on page 1.