In my view (with regards to SEO), on a page containing a post there should be nothing other than the post content, no Recent Post Widgets, no Popular Posts Widget, Random Posts Widget and neither the Tag Clouds Widget because these all might disturb the keyword ratio of the post.
I am not absolutely sure whether this is right or wrong, I am still researching on this. I saw a similar structure at Labnol, they do not have any widget displayed text or links, except the Related Posts Widget. High Traffic might be a reason why Labnol has less widgets, but I think its more relavent to SEO.
Also see: Article Syndication and Duplicate Content Issues.
In no other blog I found the same structure as Labnol. All the blogs which I have visited till date had at least a Recent Posts Widget or a Popular Posts Widget!
I saw this video a day before, Matt Cutts on Tag Clouds
Matt Cutts explains the negative effects of Tag Clouds, the first and the most important trouble tag clouds can bring is keyword stuffing. If you are using a tag cloud with large number of words, the search engine might take it as keyword stuffing which will affect the page’s search engine rankings. And the another point which Matt discussed is, unnecessary flow of page rank.
Matt Cutts opposed using tag cloud with large number of keywords, a tag cloud with less number of keywords will be ok, but These days no one gives importance to tag cloud, I haven’t got a single click on the tag cloud I used on this blog.
I am debating myself whether to use the various link widgets on this blog or not. Apart from the negative effects, there are some benefits of using these widgets:
- To pass on link juice/page rank to other posts and pages of the blog, the links in the widgets will get the link juice and that’s also important for SEO.
- Increase Pageviewes, the visitor gets lot more content to view. This has no relation with SEO, but this will be beneficial for the blog statistics i.e. to reduce bounce rate, increase ad impressions, ad clicks, etc…
Because of these two points I am not removing the various link widgets from theitechblog. But a page containing only the post content without the various link widgets, will get higher rankings in the search engine. Because the post keyword ratio will not be disturbed by various other non-related links and keywords.
Please Express your views and opinion as comments.
