Howdy, WeLoveWP Fans! Sorry for the delay in between blog posts. We’ve been busy poring over your sites to bring you the latest and greatest the WordPress community has to offer.
Today we’d like to mention something that could hurt your WordPress site rankings. As we all know, it’s easy to write a WP blog post only to find a mistake just seconds after posting. Then, a few minutes later another pops up. It’s neither unheard of nor poor practice to revise an article four or five times before it’s ready for public consumption. What you may not know is that this can be disastrous to your search engine rankings!
In a second, I’ll get to the important part. Just for some background, a “ping” is an internet term where one server sends another server a “packet” of blank information. Although there’s no real content, the packet is marked to be returned to sender as soon as the second server receives it. It’s kind of like mailing a letter knowing it will be undeliverable, assuming the Post Office will put it right back in the slot as soon as it arrives. These pings are important in WordPress blogs and other types of sites because when a search engine will receive them from new and updated sites. It is a refresher to the search engine that there’s something new there and they need to send out a web-crawler to check it out.
Search engines, however, are no fools. They know that smart internet marketers take advantage of this, and will artificially “ping” them to get their sites higher rankings; the actual inner workings of this process are beyond this article, but are explained in-depth in any book on basic Search Engine Optimization.
The problem with updating your WordPress site several times is that Google will think that the repetitive pings are from an underhanded marketer trying to cheat the system. They will mark your site as “spamming” them, and may block you from receiving web-crawlers for a period of time only known to the search engine programmers.
Don’t dismay, there’s a fix for every problem on the Web. Tune in next week and we’ll explain how to get around this “spam block” so when you edit your WordPress blog you don’t get put on the blacklist.
0 Responses to “Warning! Editing Your Posts Can Hurt Your Rankings!”
Jade
HI,
To be honest i had noticed that when editing posts in previous blogs I used to run the ranking seemed to change but always just put it up to some unknown variable that google was “rechecking” the article.
Looking forward to reading the “get around” article.
Cheers
Wordpress Web Designer
I have to disagree with this post. If you have a post that doesn’t have a rank, editing it and giving it proper SEO tags, can ONLY give it better rankings. I’ve done this time and time again with clients.