Correct VS Wrong SEO Techniques For Blogger Blogs (3)

This is a continuation of Part -3 of our series on Blogger SEO Pack 2012, the title sounds different but it will help you out to optimize links in blogger like comments, archives, categories/labels and related hyperlinks. We ended our last post with the difference between rel="nofollow" and rel="external nofollow" link attributes and we will continue from there. If you have not read that part we recommend you read it first. All links are given below:

SERIES ENDED...

BLOGGER SEO PACK 2012 SERIES

Part1: Blogger Multiple Sitemap Generation and Submission   Don't Forget to use our PHP TOOL For this!

Part2: Submit Sitemap to Bing and Yahoo without Errors and Ping them

Part3: Reduce Crawl Errors- 
           i.  Optimize Links in Blogger like Comments Archives and Labels
           ii. Correct VS Wrong SEO Techniques For Blogger Blogs

Correct SEO Concepts & Techniques

rel="nofollow"
Discussed in previous sub-part
rel="external nofollow"
Discussed in previous sub-part
rel="tag"
This is a popular and correct way of adding a tag attribute to all categories in your blog. This tag is normally used by default by Google Blogger developers in label links. It tells robots that the link is URL/address of a particular category in the blog. This helps robots to identify between normal web page links in your blog with those in categories.
In blogger a normal links looks like this:

http://www.mybloggertricks.com/2012/02/hostgator-best-hosting-plans-for.html

Note: The above link belongs to the label Make Money Online

Your blog URL is followed by trailing slash then date and then keywords from post title where each keyword is separated by a hyphen (-).

And the label link or category link or archive link that is a URL address for all your posts coming under the same category/Label. In our case the above shared link comes in the category Make Money Online. The label link would look like:

http://www.mybloggertricks.com/search/label/Make%20Money%20Online

Here as you can see the primary domain link (homepage link) is followed by keyword search and then label and then finally by label title where each keyword in label title is separated by a percentage (%) symbol.
Now your post can be accessed either using the normal link or the label link. Since both these URLS contain same content so it can create troubles for robots to identify which one is the true resource and which one is just a reference link back to the original post. The TAG is the attribute that is added to Label links and this tag attribute tells search robots that the link bring crawled is a label link. If this tag is not present then search engines can penalize your blog for sharing same content on two different urls thus your blog could get penalize for sharing duplicate content. However search robots have become so much efficient that now they can clearly identify if the link is a normal one or a label one. We are just making its job more easy by adding this tag. 
rel="archives"
Just like rel="tag" attribute this one helps robots to differentiate between archive links and other link in your blog. An archive link lists all your posts date wise. It assembles the posts by year and month.


rel="category tag" (For wordpress users only)
This is a so called correct way of adding an attribute to tags and categories in Wordpress blogs. Not relevant to us. Though this tag is never succeeded in passing HTML5 validation by W3C but I am still seeing it in many famous wordpress frameworks like genesis and thesis. The reason why it never gets validated is because w3c does not accept spaces between keywords inside a rel attribute (with exception for rel="external nofollow"). Since there is a white space between category and tag therefore it will never get validated unless or until you remove the space or replace it with a hyphen. There are several php scripts that will help you get rid of this tag in yoru wordpress blogs. Just search for "remove rel="category tag" in wordpress"

Wrong SEO Concepts & Techniques

I had been personally a victim of these false and wrong seo concepts and during my early blogging stage due to lack of SEO knowledge I kept on forwarding the wrong concepts even to my readers and I do whole heartedly apologize for it. All those posts are now pointing readers to this latest and correct SEO techniques.
Following are some link attributes that can be found on popular blogger blogs but none of them is approved by Search engines or World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Wrong:

rel="follow"
rel="index"
rel="index, follow"
rel="noindex, follow"
rel="index, nofollow"
rel="noindex, nofollow"
rel="index, tag"
There is no complementary word for nofollow. Follow is not a SEO term and should never be used. To let robots follow a link just remove the nofollow attribute from it. Simple!
Nofollow tells robots not to pay importance to the link, don't follow it and do not pass your hard earned PageRank juice to it. While noindex tells robots that the content on a particular page should not be crawled and that page must not appear in search results. Noindex is a meta tag attribute and it can never be added to links. It is silly to add noindex to links using a rel attribute. It can be mentioned only in meta tags using the content attribute.  Robots indexes pages only. The correct term for links is crawl. Robots indexes a page and crawls links.
Sources to defend my point. Read Set out rules by W3C and those at Google Webmaster Forums

Correct

rel="nofollow"        we mentioned it already
rel="tag"                 we mentioned it already
content="noindex, nofollow"
In the following example a robot will neither index the webpage, nor analyze it for links.

<META name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

Enough of Theory Tell me What to do!

I am sure I was a bit too technical with this part of the series but all this information was important in order to remove a lot of wrong concepts spreading rapidly in blogosphere and blogger forums. Now lets turn all links inside your free BlogSpot blog templates into clean, optimized and search engine friendly hyperlinks.
To Optimize comment links in blogger do this:

1. Go To Blogger > Design > Edit HTML
2. Backup your template
3. Search for the following code (Search for a similar code).:

   expr:href='data:post.createLinkUrl'

Note: If you found a rel="nofollow" in the above code inside your blog template then simply replace it with the one described below.
add rel='external nofollow'   anywhere after the a tag. Like this:

 rel='external nofollow'  expr:href='data:post.createLinkUrl'

       4.  Now search for this:

<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl'

       5.  Replace it with this:

<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl' rel='external nofollow'

      6.   Done!
To Optimize Label links in blogger do this:

1. Inside your template search for the following code: (Search for a similar code).

          <a expr:href='data:label.url'

     2.   Replace it with this one:

<a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag'     

     3. Done!

To Optimize Archive links in blogger do this:
Note the archive links will only appear on your blog if you add the archive widget. If you have not added the archive post widget to your blog then you can skip this part.

1. Search for this code inside your template:

  <a class='post-count-link' expr:href='data:i.url'>

    2.   Replace it with this:

<a rel="archives" class='post-count-link' expr:href='data:i.url'>

     3.  Finally save your template and you are all saved! :)

Series Completed

With this our series on Blogger SEO PACK 2012 ends. We tried our best to help blogger users to the best of our ability with as much technical knowledge as possible. All techniques shared in this series are the ideal ones which we apply to orders we receive from clients and are being widely practiced on MBT blog too and all blogs in its network. I have used the same techniques for my new blog on SmartEarningMethods.com. If you need any help or need further assistance, just let me know pals. I know this series was a bit techy but we can implement it together so no worries. Just feel free to post your questions. I wish these techniques may bring a significant positive change in your traffic trends and may help you use blogger with even more excitement. Peace and blessings pals! :)