On-site Duplicate Content Issues
I've been researching issues with duplicate content on a single domain. It's easy to put up a spammy, keyword replacement type site, where each page is pretty much the same. For example, one page would say "Get an American Express Card Today", and another would have the same text, but would instead say "Get Your Visa Card Today". But what do the search engines think of that? They hate it. You could get away with this type of web site a couple of years ago, but no longer. You have to be a little sneakier now, adding more dynamic content pulled from rss feeds, newsgroups, re-worded and scraped materials, etc... And you might still be found... Most people agree that onsite dup content will cause G to filter out all the duplicated pages – showing none of them. Some have mentioned that if a certain percentage of a site is considered dup content, it may begin to apply a penalty to the domain. I've read that each page must have at least 12% original content to not be considered span – I've also heard that it's currently a higher percentage than that (but not able to get specifics).
It's hard to find a consensus on anything seo related, but I've found recurring themes, from respected sources.
Posted by tedster - a WebMasterWorld administrator on Jan 3, 2006 "And if the algorithm sees many pages on the same domain that are essentially duplicate, the algo might well smell an attempt at spamming and decide not to show any of those pages."
Posted by caveman - a WebMasterWorld moderator on Sept 25, 2005 "Within a single site, when pages are deemed too similar, G is not throwing out the dups - they're throwing out ALL the similar pages."
If you want to beat the search engines at their own game, you've got to be very smart these days... and willing to experiment until you find the secret sauce. Once you find the secret sauce - it's just a matter of time until you're on their radar and they de-sauce you. But, hopefully you made a million dollars before that happened... ha! Good luck, Travis Labels: seo
Does Delicious tagging get you out of the sandox quicker?
This blog post by Wolf Howl seems to suggest that it might! But, the trick is... you have to do something that's worth of a bunch of tags in delicious. Put out something of interest to a lot of people. Write something controversial, or humorous, or both. Good stuff. -- >> There are only 10 kinds of people in the world - those that know binary and those that don't. Labels: seo
New SE algorithm's are using trustworthiness and semantic matching
The word is out that number of links no longer matter. The right links matter - links containing and surrounded by text similar to the content on the linked page, and hopefully residing on a site easily categorizable and trusted for giving out good links. Factors that may determine how important a link is to your page/site: 1. How trustworthy of a site is the linking site? - Is it an .edu, .gov domain? - What kind of a neighborhood is it in? i.e. What kind of sites link to it, and how important are they? - How accurately can the referring site be categorized? Right now, del.icio.us tags are easily deciphered and trusted. 2. How closely does the content and the link text on the linking page compare to the content on the page being linked to? - Semantic analysis between pages. - Articles and press releases, and blog postings are better than recipricol link farm pages. Labels: seo
Excellent Interview with Todd Malicoat
This interview with Todd Malicoat is worth a read. Todd Malicoat is a person to know and respect in the SEO industry. After you get past the mutual back-patting, there is really some excellent content toward the bottom. -- >> There are only 10 kinds of people in the world - those that know binary and those that don't. Labels: seo
Detecting Directory Spam
An interesting tidbit was given to me by my friend Justin - a very respected SEO who had recently talked to Google engineers about site optimization issues. The knowledge was frightening... Google will create a site and submit it to a massive directory submission service and watch where their links start appearing. They assume that since these links appeared through an automatic script, that all the other sites on that directory were automatically submitted as well, and they discount all outgoing links from that directory. In other words, they won't penalize you, but you just wasted your money by submitting to 75,000 directories at once. Unless, of course, the traffic directly from those directories makes up for it - but that's pretty doubtful...
TG Labels: seo
Newsweek SEO article
This article by Newsweek was highlighted by Matt Cutts on his blog - I just wanted to give my own two cents worth. I feel like the SEO world is slowly creeping into the mainstream. Every day I see another article about optimization. It's just that lately, those articles are coming from more and more mainstream journalistic sources. One year ago you would never had heard the terms "white hat" or "black hat" in Newsweek... These days it's getting tougher and tougher to be entering the SEO game, because there's a lengthy learning curve, and the people that have been in it for a long time have such a head start. But, the amount of press that it's getting, combined with the allure of easy money and work-at-home mentality will flood the Internet with new SEO's, and further bring the industry to the tipping point. The 'tipping point' being defined as the point when search engine optimization is a household name, a recognized industry, and not a black art practiced by shadowy figures in dark rooms. The interesting thing is that while site optimization is getting all the press, it's only one of the many ways to promote your site - and not necessarily the most cost effective. Most people will hire an SEO for hundreds or thousands of dollars to write articles, post links, submit press releases - with the promise of results down the line. They could very well be spending that same amount of money on PPC ads, or email newsletter sponsorship and seeing immediate results, instead of waiting to see what will happen... Interesting times ahead! TG
Labels: seo
Linking Strategies
This is a reprint of an email I received from Entireweb Newsletter. These folks send out good stuff - it's actually something I take the time to read most every day. This email is particularly relevant for anyone with a web site, wondering how they can go about getting more natural traffic. There aren't too many details, but it's a good primer for the 30,000 foot view of creating links back to a site. Reciprocal Linking Quite simply - this is a link from your site to another and they link back to you. A bit of advise here is to only link to sites that are relevant to yours. i.e - If you are selling Cars - only link to Car websites, a link to a Health website will really do you no justice, and trust me I have seen hundreds of website owners make this mistake. What's important here is not number of the links you have, but the quality and relevancy of the site your are linking back to. Be Selective and also take a good look at the sites linking to the site you want to link. It's really no good if this Car Site you want to link to has 40 reciprocal Links from Online Pharmacies. How to Do this : 1. Pay a SEO Company to do it for you. (can be quite expensive)
2. Buy Them
3. Link Exchange Sites.
4. Search for them on your own. Important : Do not add to many reciprocal links to quickly, build it up gradually otherwise you will be penalised by the search engines, as it will be seen as un-natural. A good way to start is not more than 10 to 20 in one month. As your site gets older you can start adding more. One Way Links This is what the search engines call a natural link, and these links are given a far better ranking than a reciprocal link. The easiest way to do this is to write articles on what you are selling and then submit them to article directories with a link back to your website. Website owners are always looking for content for their sites, and Article Directories are the easiest way for them to get content, with out them having to write them on their own. There are hundreds of these directories around and the more you submit to the quicker you will build up your one way links. It also is less time consuming than reciprocal linking and you will get far better results. MultiSite Links For this to be effective you need at least 3 to 4 websites to be involved in this. It is also seen as a natural link by the search engines and can be quite difficult to do if you only have one website. Although it can be done. You will just need to find 3 other websites that are interested. How it works is this : You link to site B, Site B links to site C, Site C links to site D and site D links back to you. This way all the sites get a link with out any of them creating a reciprocal link. Directory Listings This is also seen as a natural link as most directories don't require a link back. It's very simple and all you need to do is submit your site to as many directories as possible. There are thousand's of them on the Internet, so all it requires is a little bit of time and hard work. If you make it your goal to submit to one a day, the process won't become a tiresome. Good Luck! Labels: online marketing, seo
Getting content on your siteContent is king, they say. I'd pretty much have to agree - for several reasons. Search engines make content a valuable commodity. Textual content in particular is what I'm talking about. I don't think that search engines have figured out a good way to index the content in a video or picture very well yet. If you're relying on natural rankings in the search engines to get your traffic, the more content you have on your web site, the more money you'll make. It's really that easy. There are plenty of other factors to worry about, the most important of which is linking, but content comes first in importance on any SEO's list. This is great, but I'm busy putting up 50 other sites, and programming some cool technology and conducting A/B tests on PPC marketing, and attempting to get at least 5 hours of sleep per night. So when am I going to have time to write content? There are plenty of places to get content for your site, with a little bit of ingenuity. Here are a few of the places I've gotten content from in the past. I can't offer guarantees about the quality of the content, or if the search engines like this content, but it's not breaking any copyright laws, and not pissing anybody off too much. I do not reccommend using this content on a valuable domain - you're risking dup content penalties. My favorite place to get content is from the Newsgroups. You need to program an NNTP interface to pull data down from a news server, but search engines seem to love the real conversations taking place on the newsgroups. Several of my sites have over 250,000+ pages of content from the newsgroups. Google isn't liking it too much these days, but Yahoo is flooding me! I've scraped data from firstgov.gov for content filler on many a page with too few quality words for a search term. Load a database with keywords related to the theme of your site and do a search on firstgov.gov for the exact keyword phrase in parens. I've used the google API to put the top search terms for a keyword as content filler. I definitely do not reccommend this path anymore... I've used RSS feeds. I've scraped articles from article directories like the ones I blogged about yesterday. I've experimented with keyword replacement on copyrighted articles by writing a script to replace adjectives and verbs with their synonyms. This didn't produce very readable copy, so I've scrapped the project for now. I've coded forums, review sites, and "wiki" type sites where people surfing the site product more content. This is good stuff, if you can get the people on the site in the first place to produce it. Here's the catch with all this content though (aside from the forum/review/wiki model). It's not unique content. It's duplicate content. When I get fancy, I'll pull snippets out of large pieces of text to make it a little more unique, and keyword dense, but I'm basically putting duplicate content on my sites. This is NOT a reccommended path for long term site quality. Eventually all the search engines will catch onto dup content and quit sending you traffic. But, if you can automate the task in many many categories/urls, there is money to be made... ...for now... I'm always on the lookout for good places to pull quality, non-copyrighted content from... Labels: seo
Cool site optimization tools and tips
This is a partial list of SEO tools used by myself, and some great SEO's that I know... These are worth checking out if you're into SEO. There are a couple of obvious ones, and a few you might not have heard of. Google Sitemaps (let Big-G know what files are on your web site) Microsoft's Search Engine and directory submission tool Sweet Directory Manager Tool Nice directory of SEO tools Awesome backlink analyzer Free/paid press releases Article Submission Couple of miscellaneous SEO pointers, as of 2005-11-07. Gotta put the date, because these damn rules change all the time! 1. Put your keywords first in the title of your document. Not at the end... 2. Always make a sitemap and submit it to G. It's easy, it gives a green light for Google to put your pages in their directory. 3. Recipricol links are quickly becoming an outdated method of getting site popularity. Instead of spending your time trying to get recipricol links, spend it submitting to directories, press releases, and article distribution - getting one way links with good link text. 4. Keep your link building campaigns going - don't do a big push and then forget about it. G watches how fast links are generated to your site. If they're generated too fast, G will assume that they're spammed out - unless they keep coming at a steady rate - then they'll assume that your site is bad-ass and everybody always wants to link to you. And that's a good thing. Labels: seo
Google dup filter and SERP spam
It seems that Google has implemented a duplicate content filter across their search engine. One of my higher trafficked sites has been hit squarely in the jaw - and it may not get up off the mat! On this particular site, I loaded several thousand keywords into the database, and associated each of them with a category. Then, I wrote a brief description of the category using a main keyword. Then I replaced the main keyword with each sub-keyword for the category over and over. It was basically duplicated content, with keyword replacements. Not exactly junk, but definitely not a useful "article" - it ranked very well in the SERPS for terms with little competition. I was the king of my category for every obscure search that didn't warrant a big article by the majors - and I did very well. The latest google update has dropped this site to the bottom of the search results, but not completely out. It seems that google has implemented some sort of algorithm to detect text that is used over and over, in sufficient quantity to be duplicate content. This seems to be a site-wide penalty because of dup content - and not a individual page ranking issue. Although I feel that this site offered information that was useful to somebody that found it (customer reviews of companies that provide services), the method that I used to rank in the search engines was not directly in line with the Google webmaster guidelines and therefore I cannot complain that it got booted. I applaud their spam fighting efforts, and I'm sure the SERPS are better off with this algorithm in place. BUT - They'll always be a step behind the people that put the spam on the web. They will forever be reacting to new techniques by spammers to get content on the web and links pointed to their sites, and traffic flowing across their servers. But, they always do a good job of reacting, and the spammers need to keep on the move to stay in the SERPS. A site that's making money one day can be in the dumper the next. So, the question that needs to be asked is this: As a webmaster, is it worthwhile to be a spammer? The answer is... Unfortunately - the answer is still "yes". But, be ready for a high amount of volatility in your business, and be prepared to spend a major amount of time trying to find the secret sauce to get by google's amazing algorithms. btw - as of this writing, Yahoo and MSN have not come close to G's spam detection algorithms. The traffic from these two sources is still flowing.
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>> There are only 10 kinds of people in the world - those that know binary and those that don't.
Labels: seo
Advanced Link Campaigns
I read an excellent SEO article about building a link farm by Andrew Goodman today. The blog post covers a link campaign started by Autoblog to build massive backlinks. They're giving away a free iPod Nano plus an FM transmitter to somebody who enters their contest. In order enter their contest, you must link to at least 10 posts on their site, using your own words about why you liked those links. Smart. Deep links, expressive link text, massive backlinks from some quality places, all for a couple hundred dollars. This type of campaign is most certainly not going to be smiled upon by Google, or any of the search engines, because it creates artificial cloudiness of link relevance. Would any of those people have posted the links naturally if they didn't have the chance to win an iPod? I don't think so - and this is a nightmare for G in much the same fashion that purchased links are controversial right now... Watch out for this tactic - it's gonna get ugly! TG
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>> There are only 10 kinds of people in the world - those that know binary and those that don't.
Labels: seo
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- Name: Travis Giggy
- Location: Fort Collins, Colorado, US
I am passionate about business on the Internet. This blog is my personal archive of lessons learned while conducting business on the Internet.
I started programming web sites 11 years ago.
In 1997, I started my first Internet business, called Carryout.com. It was an online food ordering service that allowed you to order food from a local restaurant right to your door. At the time, that was pretty cool!
The fire was stoked, and I started learning as much as I could about Internet marketing and copywriting. I became an expert at measuring and testing.
I've been a success and a failure many times over.
Now, a decade later, I still learn every day what it takes to be successful in online business. This blog is how I record those lessons. Since I started this blog, I've learned the value of keeping a written record of my Internet business experiences. As long as I keep learning and growing, I'll keep writing about it.
I doubt I'll ever quit learning.
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