5 Minute Blogger Tip: Labels & Duplication

I really do hate Google for their over-zealous fighting against sites that they think are spamming because sometimes they write short posts and are forced to have large templated navigation designed to help G-Bot around their blog.

It's a complete contradiction in my mind.

I've got one blog that I often write posts that are about 100 words long, but have a comprehensive templated-navigation system as its good for Google and good for the user.

The only issue is that on these short posts the amount of code that is present for the navigation can be twice/three times more than the post and as it's present on every page Google has got really upset with them.

Also if you've got posts and whish to tag them into labels you'll have problems if you don't have them more than several tagged with the same label.

So after looking over the stats and remembering what I've been doing I've established this strategy:

1) Write over 200 words for your posts;
2) Don't over-do your templated navigation. Use the MainOrArchivePage and ItemPage tags to make sure that the same content isn't shown on every page
3) Make your first post, copy the meta information below meta keywords, remove their tag to add the meta data in.
4) Make your own variable meta descriptions and meta keywords for the post pages
5) Remove the archive pages and make your own monthly summary posts
6) Wait until you've got sufficient posts before you label.
7) Keep a text version of the title and metatags for each label page directly on the server.
8) Realise that this is too much work and have a look at following the crowd and install WordPress.
9) Remember that its good to be different and when you've worked out your strategy its not all that hard work really.
10) Also remember that if it forces you to get your 'thinking-cap on' then its no bad thing!

I'm not going to give in and install Wordpress. Every problem has its solution and that doesn't always mean installing stuff on the server. It just means that you've got to really understand Google et al and find clever solutions. Its just so boring doing what everyone else is doing.

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The blogger team seem to be spending a lot of time on foriegn language versions. Me being selfish, I want them to add more features such as archive snippeting, variable meta data for label pages, own-blog search. etc etc.

But they are bringing in scheduled posting, Blog lists, Subscription Links, the search :-), polls etc.

Guys you're taking longer than my plumbers and I still don't have a loo to show for all their hard work!