Does Google hate wordpress?

[KateV]

I have my categories pages set to noindex, follow.

I deactivated the author and date based archives, and all the /page/2 /page/3 are noindex.

Is this the right approach?

I had thought about adding some text to the topic of each category page and then changing them to index.

I'm using showing recent post excerpts on the homepage.

Another other suggestions? I think two of my sites are in panda for no good reason. It seems like non-wordpress blogs in my industry do better than comparable wordpress sites.

[jesse-landry]

hi there, wonder if i can ask my question here to you Tom --

I found your post helpful and have been reading that blog entry you linked to. I'm working on a couple wordpress blogs grandfathered into the company I work for and am trying to clean them up. They are providing something like a combined 800 links to my company's domain and we have a manual penalty with Google currently so I'd really like our backlink profile to be cleaned up.

So basically... I can't seem to install the Yoast plugins. Is that only for those who are hosting their wordpress offsite? Or how does that work... because basically, i go to wordpress.com and login and I can't upload files to directories or anything like that.

I guess I'm a wordpress noob, but proud to be. Because my experience with wordpress so far has been far from positive.

(backstory: when I got here, our company website had been developed in a Wordpress format and was a pain in the ass to work on. Nay, impossible to work on. I spent a month completely redesigning the site in HTML and have been happy as a clam since. But that is unrelated to the wordpress blogs we are running...)

Anyway, thanks

[TomRayner]

Hi there

Wordpress can be very SEO friendly when set up correctly, but setup incorrectly it can be a bit of a nightmare.

Let's be clear - Google hates duplicate content, not certain CMS's - particularly one of the most popular ones in the world.

Sounds like you're well on your way to fixing any problems that may have occurred, but if you're still looking for help, I'm always reminded of Dan Shure's excellent blog post on how to optimise WordPress for success. Have a read through there to see if it helps.

Panda is being integrated into the general algorithm as we speak/type, but it may still require a refresh to lift any Panda penalty on your sites. These have been monthly, but expect them sooner in the near future now it is being integrated.

To double check to see if your penalty coincides with the panda penalty, check out: MyTrafficDropped and Ryan Kent's great blog post. If you can't see why your site is being penalised, you may find that your penalty is down to something else.