Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Blocking the Wayback Machine – Internet Archive

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Have you come across the Wayback Machine?

It’s been around for some years, and aims to be an archive of the internet—forever.

I do enjoy having a brose and seeing how far some sites have come, as well as looking back at sites I made years ago.

However, just because it’s fun to browse doesn’t mean you always want your site on it. Now, once a cached version is there there’s not a lot to be done, however you can stop it indexing your site in the first place.

Just add this to your site’s robots.txt file:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

That tells the Internet Archive to ignore your site when it’s indexing the internet.

Easy!

Taking my own advice

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As you’d expect for someone obsessed with SEO I regularly check my own ranking on Google and the other major search engines.

But when I did my regular search today on Google I found myself in number two. 2! I’ve been first for months, and now there’s a pesky LinkedIn directory above me.

My first thought was, “But I haven’t changed anything!” and of course, that’s the problem.

I’ve only blogged a few times in the past four months. I used to keep a regular schedule of three times a week, and Google loved me for it. It got their SEO juices flowing. But now, I’m falling – and it’s totally because I’m not generating enough content.

Content really is king for SEO. Yes there are all sorts of things you can do behind the scenes (and as a WordPress SEO expert – those are my specialty) but ultimately SEO is about reinforcing your core content; key messages, what you’re all about – that sort of thing.

After the sort of work I do the next most important thing to keep Google, Bing – all the search engines happy -is to have regular, topical, original content on your site. And there’s almost no better way to achieve that than blogging. It doesn’t need to be called a blog of course – you can call that section Update, or News – whatever creates an area in your site where you’ll be posting regularly.

It’s ironic in one way (and not in the Alanis sense, but something that actually fits the definition of irony) in that I write to at least two clients a day extolling the virtues of blogging. I’ve been so busy preaching the blogging gospel that I haven’t had the time to do it myself.

Well, all that changes today. Thrice a week, you’ll see me writing. And you’ll see me back at number one as a result of those efforts.

And I won’t feel like such a hypocrite when delivering my SEO sermons.

Do not buy backlinks. Fullstop.

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Following on from this post which answers a question I get asked every day, here is my view on purchasing back links, which I am also asked about regularly.

Backlinks are useful, however I strongly recommend you do not buy any. If you get them “naturally” then that’s great. But Google has always said they will try to penalise any site that buys them. So while you might find a vendor who has some great system for implementing links that they haven’t found yet, if Google does realise that you’re trying to trick them (and they will eventually) you could find your site disappears from their listings entirely.

Just don’t do it. Fullstop.

Create a Google Account using an existing email address (Drive, Google Plus, Calendar, etc.)

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You can create a new Google account to access their suite of tools using your existing email address. The only Google app you’ll not be able to access is Gmail. which is fine because your email is already managed elsewhere.

This saves you having to have a Gmail account that you need to check in addition to your current email. This is great for me, I’ve already got three addresses and the thought of an extra email is a bit much.

Rather than going through the “Create and account” option you’ll see when you sign up for a Google service like Goggle+, go here instead:

https://accounts.google.com/newaccount

You’ll note the option “I prefer to use my current email address”–use that!

Like most things, it’s easy when you know how. Or in this case, where.

Google authorship in the code

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It goes without saying that we love Google Authorship, and the snippets produced by having it set up.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s all you need to know in one photo:

Having this set up grabs peoples’ attention.

Part of the process of setting these up is to have a link on your pages back to your Google Plus profile. All the guidance from Google, and therefore most online sources, is to have an icon or short piece of text that links to your profile.

Not everyone wants to link to their Google+ page. And for good reason; a lot of website authors only have G+ accounts for the sake of getting these authorship snippets working. They certainly don’t want to drive visitors to a social profile they aren’t actively using.

Here’s a solution I worked out myself. As far as I know, I’m the first to be publishing this.

Simply drop this code into your website, anywhere at all. It doesn’t display anything on the site—it just sits in the code, but works 100% as a Google Author link.

<a href=”your-profile-url?rel=author” />

So for example mine is:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/u/1/110002801838494280534?rel=author” />

It’s that simple!

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