Although it’s a moderately complex process with a lot of picky steps, it only took about an hour each time. Google has pretty good information posted online, and mostly it’s up to date. The best place to start learning on Google is here.

First, a short rant. Google is pretty much demanding that we stay on top of their quirks and developments in making search better. If you as a blog author do not keep up, your position in search can plummet. They are using the threat of decreased search visibility to get more and more people doing more and more work in order to provide information so Google can better locate their sites. And all of this makes Google money. They’re not necessarily doing it to make you rich.

• Start by making sure you have a Google Plus account fully set up. This might take you an hour if you don’t already have one.
• Link your G+ account to your blog and your blog back to G+. (Note the little “Google+” in my sidebar, which is how I proved to Google that this blog is connected to my G+ account.)
• Many WordPress themes do not populate posts/articles with an “updated” meta notation. This can be a problem and it’s what I’ll really deal with now.

I used two methods to solve the “updated” issue.

WPEngine: If you are on WPEngine, you can go to your WPE control panel (topmost icon in the admin sidebar) and the General Settings and find the panel for HTML Post-Processing. What this panel does is allow you to perform search-and-replace on the HTML of your articles before they are sent out to a browser. If your theme is not including any “updated” meta information, you can just plug your “published” information so it doubles as “updated.” Use this replacement rule:

#class=”date published# => class=”date published updated

The other way to do this is to add a function to your functions.php file within your theme. Just add the code at the bottom of your own functions file. The PHP function (see below) will find the “date published” meta information and will add “updated” to it. This performs essentially the same function as the WPE method shown above, but works on any WP blog. (Your blog may not insert a “published” marker, in which case this won’t work…you may have to tailor it to find the particular class your theme is wrapping around the publication date.)

function add_my_updated($s) {
$s = str_replace(‘class=”date published’, ‘class=”date published updated’, $s);
return $s;
}
add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘add_my_updated’);

(I revised this article to determine why Facebook wasn’t letting me publish…)

The post Your photo in google search results – WordPress theme problems with “Updated” meta appeared first on Sky's Blog.

If your web site requires a lot of CPU time to generate pages, then nginx may not hold any advantage for you. [2. I define “A lot” as more than a second.]. You can test to see what your page-generation time is using webpagetest.org — and what you want to look at is the bar that shows how much time elapsed between the browser’s request and the delivery of the first byte of the page. The time it takes to serve that first HTML file is pretty much composed of CPU and MySQL (database) time. If the time between the HTTP request for the page and the first byte served is long (a couple of seconds) then your site is probably too CPU-intensive and nginx may not help you out very much.

That said, more and more people are moving toward specialized WP-hosting, where they don’t have to worry about what web server is used at all. And within a few years this may be a moot point, as nobody may be self-hosting their own WP any more!

Footnotes:

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