Google News WordPress Plugin and Fresh Content : Does Google Prefer Fresh Content? is an article I wrote a while

Comment on Stallion WordPress Theme Feature Requests by Stallion WordPress SEO Theme.

Does Google Prefer Fresh Content? is an article I wrote a while back about fresh content.

Didn’t install the Google News plugin, but have seen similar.

I’d be very careful using this type of WordPress plugin on important websites. The content is duplicate content (someone elses content) and if the content is spiderable you’ll be wasting link benefit via links to the news items.

To make this sort of concept worthwhile you’d have to create posts or pages aimed at various news worthy SERPs. Cheap Mortgages for example, create a post called Cheap Mortgages, add a Google news feed for cheap mortgages (10 items say) and every time Google news updates your post updates.

SEO Issues

Wasting link benefit : probably easy to solve using the Stallion link cloaking script, edit the plugin to use the Stallion link cloaking code rather than standard links, if the links are nofollow by the plugin Stallion can convert them to cloaked links without having to even edit the script (Stallion Advanced SEO feature).

Duplicate content : This is why you don’t use this technique on important websites. The content is copied from Google News and is duplicate. Although it’s not as bad as an autoblog it’s definitely in that greyhat SEO area. If you have a relatively large site and add a few relevant pages with Google news feeds that auto update you’ll probably be fine. Build a website with only these types of pages and you are pushing it.

Not exactly the same, but similar http://www.ericreuther.com/ (PR3 56,000 pages indexed in Google). This site is almost all Google news feeds, it’s not single pages that auto update, it’s pulled the individual news items into posts. Over the past month it’s received just over 250 visitors, clearly penalized.

I use a plugin I’m calling “Stallion Fresh Content WordPress SEO Plugin” that’s based on an old plugin with my major updates. This plugin randomly reposts your old posts as fresh content to the top page of archives (home, categories, tags) so it appears the site is updated frequently. You set the time for a ‘new’ post in minutes and when a visitors hits your site after that period a post is randomly selected and given the current date/time. I’m using it on quite a few sites that have timeless content and I don’t update often. For example at Make Money Online Guide and Free Recipes, though the recipe site has so many posts (131,120 posts) that’s more about getting the entire site indexed: it’s only PR3 but has 132,000 pages indexed in Google which is going to be close to 100% indexed (that’s impressive for a large site these days).

If you visit those sites over a 24 hour period (once every hour say) the last post should change most times as I have the set to update between 30 and 60 minutes.

When I get the time plan to add the Fresh Content WordPress SEO Plugin to the WordPress repository, need to write the readme files etc…

Anyway, this plugin will have a similar impact to updating your site on a regular basis because all the archive pages will update regularly and on posts and pages the sidebar widget Recent Posts will change.

I don’t use the plugin for SEO gain from fresh content per se because in my experience it’s not the fresh content in itself that results in better rankings (see the article Does Google Prefer Fresh Content?) I use it because it helps with spidering, changes the RSS feed content regularly (great for large sites like the recipe site and works with the Copyfeed plugin (free from WordPress SEO Plugins) in generating links from sites that scrape RSS feeds ) and it makes a site with timeless content appear regularly updated.

I was going to add it to the Stallion theme, but you can’t use it if your permalinks structure uses dates, when the posts date is updated the permalink changes and this results in 404 errors. So will be released as a stand-alone plugin.

David

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