Tag Archives: blogging

How Dating Posts Can Work Against You ( SEO )

Too long didn’t read version >>

Backstory

For those of you who may not know, I run a website called AfternoonCrash.com. Recently, I had a story go viral after my post on Heath Ledger’s Inspiration for the Joker was high on the Google ranking for anything related to Heath Ledger and the Joker. My post had been around for months and saw a little traffic here and there. Once the internet took hold if it suddenly it popped up everywhere including some pretty mainstream sites as “new.” Hardly anyone gave credit where credit was due but, I am not here to complain about that.

What I found very interesting was, my post was suddenly marked old by Google and fell very far down on the ranking. The people who knew where the post came from, had to search for Heath Ledger, the Joker and afternooncrash in order to find they post they were familiar with (I watched my stats like a hawk). This concerned me because now all of a sudden, my traffic started going down and those other sites were apparently more relevant to Google.

Technical Solution

Was the date of the post really the issue, or was it something else like the popularity of the website? I had a hunch and did some research, that is when I came across an article by ProBlogger.net where the author stated:

“Dates on Recent Posts But Not on Older Ones – I saw one blogger do this last year (I’m afraid I don’t remember who it was). They had hacked WordPress so that dates appeared on recent posts (within the last 3 months) but anything older than that did not have time stamps either on the post or comments. This meant that the blogger benefited from new posts looking new and took the potential distraction of old posts away from readers. I don’t know exactly how the blogger did it but presume they set up a rule that looked at the date of authorship and then determined whether the date would be displayed or not.”

This idea sounded exactly like what I was looking for. With a quick Google search I found a post on http://goodkarmahost.com which showed exactly how to do this in WordPress.

It is as simple as replacing the following line in my single.php file:

1
<?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?>

With:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
<?php
$today = date('r');
$articledate = get_the_time('r');
$difference = round((strtotime($today) - strtotime($articledate))/(24*60*60),0);
if ($difference >= 30)
{
?>
<!-- Aged Gem -->
<?php
} else {?>
<!-- Fresh Gem --><strong><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?></strong>
<?php
}?>

Conclusion

Finally, what does this all mean? Once I implemented this code to remove dates from older posts, suddenly my post found its way to the top of the Google search and, traffic is starting to flow again.

Now, if you are posting time sensitive material then you probably won’t want to do this. However, if you material isn’t time sensitive this is an excellent solution to keep your recent content relevant by containing dates and showing your readers that you are regularly updating the site, as well as, keeping your older content relevant and not automatically buried by Google because you were one of the first people to discover the content.

For more information on dating content I suggest you check out the article on ProBlogger.net.

As always, I would love to hear what you have to say in the comments! Send me all of your success or failure stories.

It’s Time to Disqus

Over the past month or so I have visited a few sites.  I commented on various articles and I couldn’t help but notice, they all had a pretty cool comment system. Normally, I wouldn’t have payed much attention but, I started noticing it was giving me statistics on my comments from other websites. After researching, it quickly became apparent that this comment system should be everywhere. It equally benefits the site admin and the site viewer.

The Admin’s Perspective

disqus moderate comments

The Disqus team really thought about the user and the admin with this product. Without exaggeration, I was able to apply for a Disqus account, configure the settings and install in under 10 minutes. Disqus supports the most popular blog platforms. My perspective will be from WordPress. After installing, all there was left to do was, add some styling to fit my theme a little better (not that there was much to change because the system is very clean and simple). Disqus even includes a custom styling section where you can add CSS of your choosing, with a built in preview. Unfortunately, the preview only seems to show positioning. Integration with the website is seamless. So seamless, it exports comments from your old comment system and imports it into Disqus with an automated system. Want your site to be mobile friendly? Disqus is now automatically enabled for it’s mobile version. Afraid of getting spammed? Disqus integrates with Akismet.  From comment moderation to following discussions away from your site, about your site (reactions), this system has it all.

The Commenter’s Perspective

disqus profile comments

As you go from blog to blog, you may become more and more involved in discussion. However, that discussion usually ends after you move onto the next article or you have to remember the page and go back to it. Not with Disqus. Disqus is a system that stores your comments in their system, as well as, each individual website. Don’t worry because “Disqus does not make any claims to the ownership or control of the comments.” This means that you can create a Disqus profile and then check out all of your comments from http://discus.com/username.  Here you can reply to your comment discussions to continue the discussion for all of the comments in once place, without ever having to go back to the individual websites. Even if you don’t want a profile, you can comment using your Twitter, Facebook and OpenID accounts. Disqus adds to the social by allowing other commenters to vote by “liking” your comment. This, in turn, allows comments to be sorted by popularity. Earlier, I mentioned that Disqus has an import feature. When sites import old comments it enables another useful feature. As a commenter with a Disqus profile, Disqus will search through comments from those old systems and allow you to link your old comments into this system.

Room For Improvement

Now that I have Disqus setup, I see a few issues that I would like to check out. Looking through the Knowledge Base, it feels like a glorified FAQ and is not very search friendly. I also wish there was better documentation surrounding how to properly handle your old comment system.  As previously noted, the custom code preview doesn’t show your theme and doesn’t appear to show pre-CSS3 code like -moz and -webkit.  Yeah, I know, I am nitpicking.

In Conclusion

In my opinion, this is a great product. As you can see this is an incredibly useful tool which is going to revolutionize the commenting systems available today.  There are too many features to list here and I am still digging through them all. What are you waiting for? Get over to Disqus.com and let me know what you think in the comments!