SEO for Pligg

This post is aimed at owners of Pligg powered websites, though many of the tips are universal, and how to implement them into the Pligg script.

These tips are definitely not new but new owners may not know how to implement them properly, hopefully this will help.

Stories per page:

Opinions will differ on this one, but I would recommend keeping the number of stories per page between 10 and 15, too many outbound links could get your site labeled a link farm. It also will keep your website looking cleaner and easier to read.

Implement – go to your Admin panel > Configure > Misc > Page size

Open story title in new window:

While this may go against principles for proper user accessibility, this is a critical step. If you do not have your website set to open the stories in new windows, it takes your user away from your website. If they want to come back they need to hit the back button or re-enter your url in the address bar.

This maybe fine for most sites, but since a Pligg powered website’s primary function is for voting on submissions and most users vote on multiple submissions per session, having the outbound links open in new windows is more convenient.

I would also recommend using the story title as the outbound link and having the URL as the link instead of linking to Pligg’s out.php file. This offers a cleaner look, and helps the user determine what site he will be forwarded to.

Implement – go to your Admin panel > Configure > Story > Use story title as link > true

Implement – go to your Admin panel > Configure > Story > Open story title in new window > true

Images:

All images should contain an alt tag and specify the height and width. The alt tag should be informative, I generally like to use the story title as the alt tag.

Implement – open link_summary.tpl

find:

change to:

Note I have added an alt tag and specified the height and width for the thumbnail for each post. The height and width can be whatever works for your website.

Hidden text:

Apparently the developers at Pligg are the only ones that don’t know that hidden text is a big no-no when it comes to SEO. They still insist on adding hidden text in their footer.tpl file a long with their live visible link, thus resulting in you passing on double the link juice and risking getting banned or “sandboxed” by Google.
This is the code I am referring to:

{* Please do not edit the code below. *}
{checkActionsTpl location="tpl_footer"}
<div class="footer" style="display:none">Powered By <a href="http://www.pligg.com/">Pligg</a></div>

They try to make it seem as if this section is crucial to running the script, when in actuality all you need is:

{checkActionsTpl location="tpl_footer"}

Do yourself a favor and remove the hidden link to Pligg and leave the visible live link to them instead.

Sitemaps:

Sitemaps are a crucial piece of SEO as it tells search engines where everything is located. Sitemaps can be submitted to Google through the webmaster tools section, which every site should be part of.

Google Webmaster Tools

Patchlog has created a module that will create a sitemap and automatically ping Google and other services everytime someone submits a story.

Spam:

Having your website riddled with spam will not only turn off search engines, but your users as well. Unless you have the time and patience to continuously monitor your website for spam posts, especially if you have the XML Sitemap Creator module installed, you need help.

Check out our module that forces submittors to get by reCaptcha before a story can be submitted.

Removing the word “category”:

While it isn’t really a must, it will clean up your URLs. I would remove the word “category” from your URL using URL method 2.

My good friend Lincoln has done a fantastic tutorial on how to achieve this.

Duplicate content:

Another no-no with Google is duplicate content, unless your Digg. Heres how to avoid it on your Pligg install.

Open your robots.txt file and add:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /3rdparty/
Disallow: /libs/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /internal/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /thickbox/
Disallow: /api/
Disallow: /evb/
Disallow: /avatars/
Disallow: /admin_index.php
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /story.php
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /user.php
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /img/
Disallow: /story/
Disallow: /story/title/

This was another tip from Social CMS Buzz.

Rel=”nofollow”:

rel=nofollow Though I have mixed feelings about using this tag, once you start building up members, stories and a steady traffic base, you may want to implement the nofollow tag.

By default Pligg comes with already included, however, for a new Pligg website I advise removing it.

It will be extremely difficult to get bloggers, your main source of stories, to register and submit posts to your Pligg powered website if there isn’t any link juice added.

Like many blogs, make yourself a dofollow blog to entice users to submit content. Once established, you can revert back to being a nofollow blog or remain a dofollow blog.

This is controlled by the link_summary.tpl file:

<div id="ls_thetitle-{$link_shakebox_index}" class="toptitle">
{if $use_title_as_link eq true}
{if $url_short neq "http://" && $url_short neq "://"}
<a rel="nofollow" href="{$url}" target="_blank">{$title_short}</a>
{else}
<a rel="nofollow" href="{$story_url}">{$title_short}</a>
{/if}
{else}
{if $pagename eq "story"}
<a rel="nofollow" href="{$url}">{$title_short}</a>
{else}
<a rel="nofollow" href="{$story_url}">{$title_short}</a>
{/if}
{/if}</div>

This is a decision you will have to make.

I would no matter what, make your about and contact pages nofollow as they are pages that are not as important thus do not need any link juice being passed on to them.

Avatar/Gravatar/Favicon:

Favicon generator I strongly recommend creating a favicon for your website, then register at Gravatar, at Gravatar make sure it matches your favicon, also keep a copy of the avatar you are using for Gravatar on your local machine.

The purpose of this is so that whenever you make a comment on a blog, your avatar will match your favicon, thus branding your website and spreading it’s brand while commenting on blogs, your source of traffic. Which leads us to giving back to the source of many of your stories, bloggers.

It is imperative that you visit and comment on any story that interests you or a story that you have a valuable comment to add to. This not only provides a backlink to you, but also provides traffic. Another bonus to commenting on blogs is building up relationships with the blogger, thus making them more susceptible to submitting more stories to your website.

This list is not the end all to be all, but a simple look at a few things you can do to help make your website more SEO ready.

I welcome more tips and comments. Please drop me a line below.

Do you have more tips?