Blizzard Internet Marketing doesn't get WordPress SEO

Mary Bowling and Carrie Hill over at Blizzard Internet Marketing invested quite a bit of time into writing a white-paper about SEO for WordPress blogs, which hit the front page of Sphinn yesterday. I think they would have been better of if they had invested a bit more time into researching the real tricks about WordPress SEO, instead of doing this white paper. They say: "For a variety of reasons, nearly all SEOs agree that WordPress provides optimization benefits other blog platforms do not. " and that's the only explanation they give for why WordPress is such a well optimized system. Well I'm sorry, but I don't agree, and yes I think I'm in the position to say something about this. Out of the box, WordPress 2.3 and up comes with 4 different types of archives:

• date based archives
• per author archives
• category based archives
• tag based archives

Now, if you're the sole writer of your blog, there's at least one archive there that doesn't belong there, and 3 other ones that create huge amounts of duplicate content. My advice is to pick 1 or 2, and get rid of the rest. Blizzard "sort of" advise you to pick categories (they never even mention tags), and then say, a page later "No-Index Your Archvies". Not only is that very ambiguous, they never tell you how to do it either! When I found a few of these things in their report, I started looking into some of the sites they provided as an example. It took me about 2 minutes to find some crap. Check out this site for instance, which lists vacation rentals. If you guys are so good with WordPress, how come I can find stuff like this, obviously showing that you don't know what you're doing? Now I've got some advice for the people at Blizzard: start reading up on your WordPress SEO, by reading Michael Gray, Andy Beard and my own stuff. For those of you who don't have the time to learn everything there is to know about WordPress SEO by reading all of it in a few days, you should join my brand-new WordPress mailing list, which will give you weekly WordPress plugin news, SEO tips and more to optimize your blog!