Duplicate content can be a hassle even though it’s not necessarily a punishable offense. It’s as legal yet ripe for spamming abuse as bold tags, to be honest. Besides which, because Google is all about gathering unique and original results, the search engine has a tendency to group together pages that essentially contain the same material into just one result, which sometimes leads to a low SERP (search engine results page) ranking and a needlessly long and unfriendly URL full of parameters and special characters.

Why Duplicate Content is Bad for SEO

• Dilution of SEO: It’s much more effective in SEO terms to have twenty back links leading to one link than twenty separate URLs and pages essentially containing the same material over and over. Such an act essentially dilutes the effectiveness of the back links between redundant copies of the same page. Because Google’s main priority is to provide its users with relevant and unique search results every time in light of past web crawlers’ tendency to have SERP full of spammed, repetitive, plagiarized, or otherwise superfluous material, it will automatically sort out identical pages and collapse them together under one slot in the SERP.

• User-Unfriendly URLs: One other problem with duplicate content is how Google will determine which URL will choose to represent the entire stack of identical content. Picking the right URL is as important to SEO as picking the right keyword density or the right title tags. By leaving Google to automatically decide which of the two or more URLs you have best represents the whole batch of identical pages can lead to disastrous SERP results or a URL that cannot be easily branded. Furthermore, having pages featuring duplicate content can sometimes reduce your rankings depending on the search query as well.

• Less Effective Web Crawling: Having redundant sites featuring the same content over and over again will make crawling your website a hassle to Google itself, so it’s less likely for the webpage you do want to get the most hits and back links to get a higher page ranking in SERP. What Google looks for is new and original content, and it’ll be hard for the search engine to see the material you want featured if it’s hidden in piles and piles of redundant text and video. It’s more likely for the crawler to move through duplicate content than find new material if your site is full of redundant sites.

How to Fix Duplicate Content Problems

You don’t need to get rid of your duplicate content to get better SERP rankings in Google. When it comes to picking the best URL to be displayed in SERP, what Google wants the most are “canonical” URLs. Canonical in this context means the simplest and most significant version of web content that a webmaster can come up with without losing its generality. In turn, a canonical URL is a URL that you can feature on the SERP that best shows the user what the link is all about.

If you have content that’s available in two or more different web addresses, you should pick the one that’s easiest to remember and best represents your site; that’s your canonical URL. Once you’ve decided what your canonical URL is, you can then structure your website such that every one of its links will lead to the canonical URL (an act that’s also known as link consistency). Not only will this tell Google what your canonical URL is; it should also help users link to the canonical version more easily as well.

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From the get go, let this one fact be clear: Duplicate content isn’t a punishable offense in Google search result terms, but the act of spamming duplicate content is. For instance, if some spammer comes along and makes a page that contains plagiarized content from Wikipedia or other similar sources in order to drive up traffic for ecommerce’s sake without so much as marking it up or adding valid content, then that’s spamming by definition. This attempt at manipulating the system is a disservice to Google and its users. These are the sites that get punished and have their rankings reduced or revoked altogether.

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Duplicate Content Isn’t Penalized

Wikipedia offers duplicate content all the time in the form of printable versions of their articles. However, there’s an even worse scenario of duplicate content abuse that Google penalizes with extreme prejudice. Spammers who copy the content of Google in order to drive traffic to their sites are what Google refers to as people who deceive their users and manipulate their rankings. Duplicate content can be comparable to using bold tags, because they’re both perfectly legitimate actions that spammers can abuse for their own good. More to the point, just because bold tags are used by spammers to spam their content all over the web, it doesn’t necessarily mean that having bold tags is a punishable offense as far as Google is concerned.

The same could be said of spammers using duplicate content to manipulate their SERP placement to their favor; in both instances, the issue that Google is penalizing with lower rankings or outright omissions in the SERP is the act of spamming, not the act of making duplicate content or using bold tags. Let’s suppose you have a website that uses different URLs. However, instead of all of them referring to one site, they’re instead copies of the same site; different URLs, but the content on each separate page are all the same. This is actually a common mistake that websites do, such that aside from format and presentation differences, basically all the websites contain identical material (not only text, but also videos).

Examples of Duplicate Content Issues

To reiterate, producing duplicate content in and of itself isn’t a punishable offense. However, because Google values unique and original search results more often than not, even the non-spam-related use of duplicate content has its respective problems. A website full of duplicate content will not be removed by Google. However, it will suffer from certain side effects and issues that aren’t conducive to the healthy search engine optimization of a website. More to the point, having multiple links leading to separate pages containing the same content will instead dilute the popularity of what’s supposed to just one URL.

If you have two pages with the same material but different web addresses, and you have ten back links each, then you’d have a less optimized website compared to one link that has all twenty back links leading to it. The one link with twenty back links will obviously rank higher in the SERP than two links with duplicate content sharing between then twenty back links. What’s more, those two links will tend to disappear into the rankings because of Google’s tendency to omit redundant links in favor of providing its users with unique and relevant results every time. Google also tends to collapse duplicate content pages together in one result, which could lead to a common link on the SERP with a user-unfriendly URL full of parameters and the like instead of the shorter, more easily branded URLs.

Web content and search engine optimization techniques mostly revolve on how original or unique your content are in light of search engine policies concerning duplicate content. To be more specific, search quality depends on the uniqueness of your site, although duplicate content in and of itself isn’t something that’s penalized, despite possible belief. Even on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines on duplicate content outright acknowledges that most duplicate content has been made without deception in mind, so Google has no intention of penalizing each and every last instance of it.

The thing is, because plagiarizers, spammers, and scammers typically use duplicate and redundant content, people have begun associating it as a punishable offense, when in fact using it for the sake of spamming is the real reason why sites like Google penalize people for using it. If you want further information concerning duplicate content and Google’s take on it, simply Google the Webmaster Guidelines on duplicate content.

The Great Duplicate Content Myth

The existence of duplicate content penalties is a myth. To reiterate, what Google actually penalizes are sites that spam using duplicate content, not sites that use duplicate content for a perfectly reasonable goal (like, say, a printable version of the same web content). Many webmasters who don’t know better worry that Google penalizes sites for merely having duplicate content in them; this myth is further perpetuated by the query message that says that in order for it to show the most relevant results, some sites with duplicate content has been omitted.

There are some who repeat the search and see that their sites have been omitted from Google’s SERP (search engine results page), which leads them to conclude that they’ve been penalized. There has been evidence of people being worried about this as being considered a “strike” for the “infraction” of providing duplicate content. What’s really occurring here is that Google wants diversity in their search results, and they can’t achieve that by letting a popular site’s duplicate content fill the entirety of the SERP. They want to deliver unique and highly relevant content with each and every search query.

Differences between Spam and Non-Spam Duplicate Content

If for example someone searches for the “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” television series on Google, the search engine will typically provide a search result of the Wikipedia article or the main Hasbro page on that particular cartoon. However, the printable versions of those pages that showcase the exact same content will be omitted to avoid redundancy. There isn’t really any penalty from the omission though, because if you care to for the print articles for the latest My Little Pony series, the omission would be reversed and you’ll end up with all the printable versions of the websites while the web versions get removed from the SERP.

This issue is handled on a case-by-case, per-query basis more than anything else. However, there are exceptions to this rule, such that there will be penalties for those who abuse the use of duplicate content for more nefarious purposes. More to the point, the ones being penalized are typically spammers that use duplicate content for spamming. The penalty is for the spam, not the presence of duplicate content per se. Distinction between web results, uniqueness of content, and a strict policy against spam is what helped Google become a leader in the search engine field, after all.

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If you’re looking for a quick way to improve the SEO of your website, then consider making use of your title tags. The title tag is text featured at the top of your browser window. It labels what the page is about, more often than not (e.g., the main page is labeled as the main page and so forth). Arguably, these tags may be the most important SEO tags you have on hand. The majority of search engines display sixty to seventy characters from your title tag. A tag that is too long will be cut off at around seventy characters on the SERP (search engine results page).

Why Title Tags Are SEO-Friendly

Because spammers and webmasters alike abused keyword tags during the infancy of the Internet, the title tag has eventually become the most important tag you have that’ll help you achieve high index rankings on the web’s top search engines. To be true, modifying your title tag is one of the easiest and most straightforward ways to gain a significant boost in your SERP rankings.

In terms of the algorithmic weight given to title tags by the majority of search engines, there’s no denying the importance of title tags in SEO terms. In many ways, they’re as equally important to your website’s search engine visibility as back links and visible text copy. Tragically, even though this is supposed to be common knowledge among the SEO community for over a decade, it’s still overlooked and altogether discarded by webmasters.

The Title Tag and Your Company Name

Title tags are one of the best places on your website to put your company name in, truth be told. You can even place it at the beginning of the tag, if you so choose. In case your company is a well-established and popular brand, it’s quite essential to take advantage of the existence of the title tag and put your company name there. Even if you’re just a small business, putting your company name in the title tag is the perfect opportunity to gain popularity for your brand in case your website becomes a huge success.

On the other hand, you shouldn’t put only your company name in the title tag. Feel free to add some descriptive phrases on the tag because it should enhance your brand as well as improve your chances in the SERP rankings. The descriptions are for those who aren’t aware of your company or your brand (prospective customers); you regular customers should be able to find your website by name anyway, so why not cater to others as well?

The SEO Benefits of Title Tags

Search engine crawlers and spiders tend to utilize title tags as their means for determining a given page’s main topic. This is the reason why webmasters should place their keywords in the title itself, specifically close to the beginning of the title. Moreover, because the title tag’s words are often the text that appears on the clickable link on the SERP, changing them for SEO purposes could gain you more clicks and visitors as well.

To reiterate, fixing your title tags to be more SEO-friendly is a surefire way of improving your SERP rankings. For instance, let’s say you have a podcast and video site about political news that offers info and updates on current events. You decided that that the most crucial keywords for your website are “current events” and “political news”. In this instance, a page title that states, “The Largest Online Political News and Current Events Show on the Internet” is highly pertinent to the topic of your site.

Because tags used to help in garnering top page ranks, webmasters and spammers soon abused them to the point that search engines have placed less importance in such tags. Truth be told, not every website that adds the “California insurance” tag into their keywords tag can attain a top ten ranking within the results for “California insurance. Nevertheless, tags in general are still invaluable when it comes to SEO.

History of Tags and SEO

In the early days of the Internet, keyword tags have a great impact on a website’s ranking within any given SERP (search engine results page). Nowadays, keyword tags have relatively little to no influence on where a website with appear on a given search engine’s index. Site relevancy, back links, and relevancy have become the bigger priority for search engines at present when it comes to the ranking of a site in their SERP.

What’s more, the influence of keyword tags on search engines at present depend on a variety of factors, including the kind of search engine an Internet marketer is targeting and the changing assessment that search engines place on such tags. Certain search engines still put stock on tags, and as a result, tags still remain a way to acquiring traffic from those places. More to the point, tags are less of a factor for search engine algorithms and more of a factor for the users browsing through the SERP.

The Importance of Description Tags

Adding tags matter because it’s the first thing a user sees when searching for websites on a typical SERP. It also shapes his first impression on your website as well. It pays to make sure that your tags make sense. Tags should show the user on the SERP what your site is all about at a mere glance. There are a lot of other meta tags you can use to increase the traffic influx to your site too.

Don’t worry so much about the keywords tag; instead, concentrate on the description tag that (again) summarizes what your website contains in a nutshell. The description tag is often what’s mostly shown to users whenever they search on Google. As such, if you get the title and the meta description in pretty good shape, people will oftentimes see that in the search result and they’ll say to themselves, “This is exactly what I’m searching for.”

Why Tags Are More Organic

Tagging puts the definition of your website in the hands of the public. What this means is that in theory, tagging is a lot more organic and accurate than meta tags or material that’s owned and managed by the site owner when it comes to letting the user judge the relevancy of an object (video or image) or website relative to the search query. Other forms of tags, like social tags from Del.icio.us or Flickr, allow people to categorize information by themselves and share that content based on those tags.

Tagging systems are dependable when it comes to allowing a huge, distinct set of users to collaborate in labeling large, dynamic info systems like a collection of videos, a library of images, the web at large, and so on. In summary, understanding the importance of tags can be useful for webmasters; just don’t agonize about them too much, especially when it comes to keyword tags. Coming up with a decent strategy for them and learning what best works for you and your website is the way to go.

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Google’s latest Panda update has already arrived, and it has again changed the landscape of the search engine field for the foreseeable future. The blogosphere at large and several technology news pundits are seeing the update as a way for Google to give a boost on its own properties while burying the rest of its competition in the dust. Will antitrust investigators be knocking on Google’s doorstep because of the suspicious way this latest algorithm update is behaving for the search engine giant’s own benefit?

History Repeats Itself

Whether the perceived unfairness of Google Panda is true or not, the media rumblings of this update is quite reminiscent of the hardball practices of Microsoft back in the day, which actually led to several lawsuits against it and its billionaire owner, Bill Gates. More to the point, the way Panda 2.5 buries competition and improves the SERP rankings of Google’s own properties is reminiscent of how Microsoft dealt with its browser competitor, Netscape, back in the day. When Panda was updated on Wednesday, September 28, it left in its wake both victims and survivors.

More and more, people are realizing just how integral Google has become in terms of gaining visibility in the worldwide web at large. DaniWeb’s own Dani Horowitz noticed the changes around Friday morning, September 30. Ironically, the million-member DaniWeb programmers’ forum had just implemented changes when Panda was updated last February. Like Sisyphus and his boulder, it looks like DaniWeb will again work back through changes made on the site thanks to the Panda 2.5 update.

Silence is Golden for Google

Even after Google confirmed the Panda update, they were bereft with details concerning the changes. However, the winners and losers of the Google SERP rankings can easily be seen through Searchmetrics and other such services. To be true, it has become apparent that it was Google’s competitors who took the greatest hit by the changes, while big brands and some major Google properties were the biggest winners and beneficiaries of the latest iteration of the Panda algorithm. For instance, according to Searchmetrics, big brand video sites like HBO, CBS, NBC, MTV, and Hulu as well as Google’s own YouTube have become victorious in securing favorable SERP rankings for themselves.

On a less negative note, it also appears that the vast majority of sites who’s enjoying improved rankings from Google Panda the most are ones that contain a large amount of video content. It would seem that the latest update was orchestrated to improve the rankings of websites who utilize video as their primary source of content. Even the free video hosting site known as MetaCafe has attained more than 1,250 Google +1s thanks to Panda 2.5. In seems that Google has noticed the upsurge in video content popularity, and as such updated their algorithm in accordance to that demand.

Does Lack of Video Content Mean Lower Rankings?

The answer to the above question is yes and no. Although MetaCafe had an increase in +1s, Wikipedia (which has little to no video content) has over 5,600 +1s, so video content isn’t necessarily the end-all, be-all in gaining significant index rankings. On the other hand, the sites that are hardest hit by Panda 2.5 are those that have less video content. As for the allegations that people who have run-ins with Google tend to drop their rankings, you need to look no further than Verizon’s drop (they support Google’s net neutrality) and NBC’s gain (they feature video content) to see that while video content isn’t everything, it accounts for a lot in terms of improved Google rankings.

Will there be any adverse effects on your website’s SEO effectiveness and page ranking if you cross-link it to many of your other websites? Cross-linking, in many ways, seems like an artifact of the bygone era of Web 1.0 — wherein moving GIFs and hard-to-load flash intros were the norm, and in order for one of your sites to gain traffic, it was considered a good idea to link it to another, more popular site regardless of whether or not they’re even tangentially related to each other.

When Can Cross-Linking Be Bad?

By bad, of course, we mean lower page rankings or less effective SEO. To be sure, cross-linking is a sound practice in terms of linking related websites together. For example, if you have a website about Mainstream Superhero comic books, then have another site for Japanese “manga” comic books, and yet another site for independent comic books and the published version of webcomics, then cross-linking the three sites together is not a bad idea at all.

However, you’re going to start making problems for your website or collection of websites by linking unrelated sites together. Imagine yourself as the typical Internet surfer. You’ve visited a site to, say, read about reviews of the latest movies. Wouldn’t you be confused to see backlinks leading to a local parish? Or how about a link to a pet care site? How about a cross-linked website concerning Ancient Greece?

Going Overboard with Cross-Linking

The abovementioned examples of bad cross-links are the earmarks of the amateurish website disasters of the nineties, particularly made by people who use their Geocities websites to post their personal favorite links as though it’s an online bookmark page or something. Then again, some professional companies that should know better fell victim to this trap as well back in the day! There’s no beating a site that’s thematically sound from the inside-out, because it’s the kind of site that attracts the right kind of traffic.

A good rule of thumb to keep in mind when cross-linking one site to another is to keep everything pertinent. They must have something in common, or else you’d look like a spammer who posts his irrelevant websites or content along with all the popular links of the day. Websites under one banner or company can be cross-linked together. Websites that seem like a collection of unrelated stores in a typical commercial district probably should not be cross-linked (unless you’ve made a website about people visiting that particular “street”).

Is Cross-Linking SEO-Relevant or Visitor-Relevant?

Obviously, visiting unrelated sites that are cross-linked is something that the average visitor will not put up with. Then again, regardless if it’s “morally” right to do so or not, there are people out there who don’t particularly care about the satisfaction of their visitors as long as they get traffic, hence their resorting to dubious methods like deceptive links, misleading titles, or content updated in accordance to the latest trends of the day.

For a spammer that’s only concerned in gaining traffic and is paid as such by the volume of visitors he or she produces, cross-linking will work on that end. Then again, in light of Google algorithm fixes such as Panda 2.2, bad cross-linking and any presence of irrelevancy will be dealt with by the search engine accordingly. In terms of a favorable Google index placement in the long-term, let’s just say that the less your site looks like a spam page full of extraneous material, the better.

Have you had any good or bad experience with cross linking? If yes, please leave a comment below. We’d love to hear from you.

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By Kris Sroka (Guest Writer) 

By Kris Sroka (Guest Writer)

Blogging for SEO

By Kris Sroka (Guest Writer)

Content Is the King

You have probably heard it many times: “content is the king”, but actually in the world of SEO that is probably the number one statement that is always true. The SEO gurus can argue about a lot of things, and they can have different opinions about almost any aspect of SEO, but everybody agrees on the importance of the content.

So, in this article I would like to give you a few tips related to content that could improve your website’s rankings and generate more traffic to your site.

Social Engagement and Interactivity

We already know that quality and relevancy of the content is one of the most important factors that determine your website’s value in the eyes of the almighty Google. This is the first step. You must have good and original content on your website (at least on your homepage, if not on every page), but nowadays, Google also looks to see if people are engaged on your site and how they interact with your site.

This social engagement and interaction with your website can take place on one of many Web 2.0 sites, but it can and it should also take place also on your website. If Google can see that people visit your site and are engaged on it, the importance of your website in the eyes of Google can increase dramatically. It’s not easy to give any specific numbers, but the value of the content and social engagement factor could contribute to around 20% of Google’s rankings.

Blogging for Traffic and SEO

So, what can you do to keep people engaged on your website? The easiest and most important thing that you can and should do is blogging. You should have a blog on your own domain (like for example: www.marketingignite.com/blog/). Although we are using Drupal platform, I would actually nowadays recommend a WordPress blog. It’s very easy to install and update WordPress blog. There are also a lot of very useful plugins that can help you optimize your blog for search engine optimization (WordPress plugins could be a subject for another article).

You might ask me why blogging is so important. It’s so important because it’s the easiest way to keep your website fresh. If you post a new post on your blog once a week, you will add more original content, which not only Google loves, but which will also give people a chance to comment on your blog. When people comment on your blog you get more original content. Google then will notice your site as the site that engages people, which will increase your rankings and bring you more traffic.

You might think that it’s hard work to keep people engaged on your blog and to get some valuable comments, but actually it isn’t. There are tools and plugins that can make it easy for people to comment on your blog, and I’m not talking here about spam comments.

If you are a person who hates writing, or if you think that you can’t write well, don’t worry I will give some practical tips on writing, blogging and getting people to comment on your blog in my next article.

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