Displaying Post Excerpts

In last weeks blogging post I hit gold with getting your blog out of the supplemental index. It was made largely popular when Master Chow decided it was time to pay some attention to how many pages he had racked up in the supplemental index. Many people have had questions about a couple of things related to that post so I thought a quick followup was in order to address the following issues.

When will pages be removed from the supplemental index?

Be patient. Just because the handy SEO Toolbar for Firefox shows that Google cached your site doesn’t mean they did a major update. Google is constantly making incremental updates to new content or websites that have disappeared. However, every 36 days Google does a major update to the index. Search results will vary widely for the 3 - 5 days it takes for the update to happen. This is when Google will update and remove any pages restricted by your robots.txt file from the index. The last major update to the index was about 3 weeks ago, so in 2 weeks we should expect sites to see some major improvements.

How do I modify my categoris to display exceprts?

If you click on a category and the entire post is displayed each and every post will register as duplicate content in the supplemental index. The way to fix this is to display an excerpt instead of the entire post. Here’s how to modify your archive.php

1. Open archive.php
2. Search for “the_content”
3. Replace “the_content” with “the_excerpt”

Now any of the archive modules will display as an excerpt instead of an entire post. But that’s not all! As you’re writing your post you have the option to add an “Optional Excerpt” which will be displayed. Now you can write keyword intensive ‘intros’ to your posts which will be displayed in the categories, but if you decided not to write the optional excerpt you can allow wordpress to use the first 80 characters of the post to be displayed. Remember, the categories are basically another page that google will index and will be ranked in the serps so writing creative keyword intense excerpts can help your search engine traffic.