It’s been a while since I wrote an article series and I thought enough is enough. With this post, I am starting a series of articles on ‘Optimizing your WordPress blog‘ just by looking into your Google Webmaster Toolsaccount and acting upon the clues and errors there in. The final outcome should be a cleaner WordPress blog in the good books of Google that produces more relevant traffic eventually.
The topic for today is the current state of your ‘webmaster tools keyword significance‘ data as compared to what you might have planned for your blog. This is one area that a lot of webmasters and bloggers do not give much attention to, though it’s the most important aspect. Let us see how to fix these keyword significance issues instantly.
Google Webmaster Tools – Keyword Significance
To check your blog’s keywords significance, login to your Webmaster Tools account and directly go to ‘Keywords‘ under ‘Your site on the web‘. If your top 20 keywords significance look something like the picture below (like mine used to be about a month back), you have a reason to worry.
From the data above, this blog had 19 out of 20 keywords right in the context of those topics that I am handling here but the second one that read ‘says’ was totally out of context. Unfortunately, this had a weightage of 41% and search after search, I could not find enough of it on my blog posts.
I then, viewed the source rendered by my WordPress blog and found that there was some hidden text produced by the WordPress threaded comments as shown below.
<span class="says">says:</span>
And this was occurring once per comment for all those thousands of comments on this blog and hence getting a significant weightage for that keyword. Even worse, hidden texts are the worst things to have for SEO and Google will punish such websites for using keyword stuffing techniques in order to boost search ranking.
How to remove ‘Says’ from a WordPress blog?
It’s pretty straight forward, in fact. That particular code can be removed by editing your comment-template.php under wp-includes folder. Alwayskeep a back up before attempting any editing on WordPress core files. You may search for ‘says’ and find the code to remove (as listed above).
Note: Please note that any changed core files will be gone with the next WordPress upgrade and you may have to incorporate this change again then. If you want to know how to remove ‘Says’ caused by WordPress threaded comments without touching the core fles, please read this articleby Kim Woodbridge
Once you have made this change, it may take a few days or weeks before Google changes your keyword significance data. And there could be many such irrelevant keywords or hidden text added by your WordPress theme, cheap plugins etc. You have to remove them all to make sure that your insignificant keywords don’t figure in the eyes of Google bot as significant ones.
Learning of the day: Just make sure that the top ten of your keywords (as seen by Google bot) listed in your Webmaster tools is relevant to your blog. And remember, what you read on the blog is NOT exactly what is seen by Google bot.
