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For some reason, the words duplicate content seem to strike fear into the hearts of webmasters everywhere, particularly those who run affiliate programs.

Questions about dupe content are amongst the most common questions I get on my Ask Kalena blog. But most webmasters worry about this for the wrong reasons. Let me set the record straight: I don’t believe there is such a thing as a duplicate content penalty. Yes, search engines can detect duplicate pages and will do what they can to avoid including them. But that usually involves a filter-based algorithm to determine the “original” page and ignore the dupes. eMarketing firm Elliance have put together a terrific graphic that shows how this filter system works.

So search engines are good at filtering out dupe pages. However, duplicate content can cause other issues that you might not have thought about. As Eric Enge points out on the SEOmoz blog:

1. dupe content can take up a search bot’s crawl budget, meaning that some of your important pages may not be indexed.
2. dupe pages waste valuable PageRank and link juice
3. a search engine’s final decision about which is the “original” page and which are the dupes may not be accurate

I see 3. happen a lot, particularly in the case of blog posts that have been scraped or articles that have been syndicated. Pages containing my own original articles have sometimes suffered this fate when they are syndicated on a popular hub or authority site. Google incorrectly assumes that the authority site is the originator of the content and ignores my pre-dated version.

So how to avoid these issues? Where possible, use NoFollow tags to the dupe pages. If you’re syndicating content, ask your publishers to NoIndex the pages containing your content and/or to include a link back to your original source.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have noticed that Twitter has been the rising social media star of 2008. Twitter is basically community micro-blogging, or group chat, similar to the old IRC communities that were around in the 1990s, but more interactive. Twitter even has it’s own lingo such as tweet, retweet, tweeple, twits and twitterati.

The sheer influence of Twitter in such a short space of time has impacted the very nature of social media. There are reports that people are spending more time twittering than writing blog posts or posting to forums. What is it about Twitter? Is it the instantaneous conversation? The voyeur factor? Or the undeniable human instinct to follow the crowd?

Whatever it is, Twitter’s got it. So much so that new search engines have sprung up to enable people to search Twitter conversations that they might have missed. Two of these are Summize and Twistori. The first enables you to search Twitter conversations via keyword, phrase or Twit. The second and most fascinating one is a voyeuristic slide show of conversations in real time, based around six emotions: Love Hate Wish Think Believe Feel and Wish. From the imagination of one of my favorite Webstock speakers, Amy Hoy, together with Thomas Fuchs, Twistori has already gained attention and praise from Twitter founders.

So now there’s no excuse for missing the conversation.

Last week, it was announced that Yahoo and Google had formed an agreement for Google AdSense ads to run on Yahoo’s US-based search results for a trial period of 2 weeks. Rumors suggested that this was a direct retaliation for Microsoft’s seemingly low bid and veiled “hostile takeover” threat.

Well, the trial has only been running just over a week and according to Marketing Pilgrim, Yahoo and Google are madly in love with the potential of their new relationship. So much so that they’ve stopped the trial earlier than expected. Perhaps they’ve seen enough click-through evidence to prove the whirlwind romance has what it takes to last the distance. Or perhaps Yahoo felt they had made their point to Microsoft.

Has it been enough to make Microsoft so jealous as to increase their offer for Yahoo and knock out their rival in love and ad profits? Time will tell.

Today marks a special event on the web.

According to the Google Blog, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has today accepted KML 2.2 file format as an official OGC Standard. KML began life in Google Earth as a way to save custom map features and developed into a sophisticated format that is used by a large number of widely used mapping platforms.

Google handed KML 2.2 over to the OGC in a bid to provide a higher level of accessibility to geographic-based web content. Bravo Google!

As predicted in my blog post last week, Google has made the decision to sell off the Search Marketing firm they acquired as part of their purchase of DoubleClick.

The Performics division of DoubleClick has been divided into two separate companies, an affiliate marketing firm and a search marketing firm, with Google announcing they will be selling the search marketing business off as soon as possible. The affiliate marketing side of the business will be integrated into Google’s existing operations.

This is taken from Google’s blog announcement:

“It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party.”

Some say that Danny Sullivan’s open letter to Google last month may have prompted the search giant to take action sooner than expected. Whatever is behind the decision, it’s a smart move and one that has many search engine marketers heaving a huge sigh of relief today.

Earlier this month, Google completed their formal acquisition of major advertising firm DoubleClick Inc., for $3.1 billion in cash from equity firm Hellman & Friedman. The purchase, originally announced nearly a year ago, has had it’s fair share of detractors and legal hurdles to clear before going ahead, with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) grinding negotiations to a halt shortly after the original announcement. However, the FTC finally gave the green light on the deal in December.

But Google’s DoubleClick woes may not be over just yet. According to Startup Earth, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has revealed that DoubleClick employees have been asked to submit their resumes to a senior Google committee in advance of possible staff cuts. Here’s a snippet from the post:

“The move is said to affect employees in every department, who will have to prove not only that they are capable of fulfilling their previous roles, but also that they are ‘Google material’, which could leave many veteran employees with virtually no job security pending a personal review.

DoubleClick employees at all levels are said to be furious and deeply concerned by the effect this acquisition will have on personnel, and many are looking at their options.”

One of the more obvious areas where Google may downsize is within the DoubleClick owned search marketing company Performics. It’s been noted that when Google acquired DoubleClick, they also acquired Performics, making them the owners of a search engine optimization and link building company. The irony of this is probably not lost on them, not to mention the conflict of interest issues it raises. I would expect to see an announcement from Google in the next few months that they will be dissolving that portion of the business.

Apart from that little hiccup, I’m expecting the DoubleClick deal will result in the release of superior tools for targeting, serving and analyzing online advertisements. We’ll have to wait and see.

Jason Santa Maria is a graphic designer from New York. He currently works as Creative Director for Happy Cog Studios and Art Director for A List Apart Magazine. Ever the design obsessif, Jason is known to take drunken arguments to fisticuffs over such frivolities as kerning and white space.

Jason started his Webstock presentation by changing his subject entirely. He originally wanted to talk about how to use grids and tyopography etc but realized he had to start with storytelling - storytelling with a plan. He decided that a better title for his talk was Design for Communication. How does a design tell a story? Jason explained that we first look at images for the narrative and thread of a story because we can’t read the text. This is called graphic resonance. So the designer IS the narrator. Magazines combine the imagery with the text really well e.g. Wired magazine. Jason explains that the design differs for the story being told. Magazines set the tone for what you’re going to read with design and images. When stories are converted to an online format, things change. The tone changes. The impact changes. The meaning changes. For example, a Wired article looks really boring on the web site compared to the magazine version. Stories online are being distilled down to content.

Why isn’t the design on the web? Where is it? “Design can’t NOT communicate” said David Carson of his Helvetica design. Every line, every pixel, every absence of pixel is communicating something. Our stories are lacking, says Jason, where’s the passion? Jason made this point by showing a slide of 15 different web layouts. Speech bubble logos and web layouts are all doing the same thing, looking the same. Why are we plagued by the sameness? Most web designers aren’t designers at all, he says. Should we just design harder? We don’t have the limited typefaces we used to have. We only have constraints. So why aren’t we using our options?

We all start with a blank canvas so why don’t our designs look that good? It’s the nature of the medium that is separating the print designs from the web designs. We define good web design by our view of what makes good print design. On the metaphorical page, Jason says there is an urgent need for communication based upon precision and clarity. These aren’t new problems but old problems requiring new solutions. We should change the way we think about a page or what a page actually is.

Contraints of the web page include:

-> there are no limitations or definitions to how big a page can be
-> we can only see a small portion of a web page, unlike a book
-> everything needs to be on one page
-> we have a much shorter time to capture the audience

Online, you can change things like navigation. The user and the author can change the way they publish and read the content. Online you can’t grasp how much information there is to read or how much time it will take to grasp the content. However a newspaper or a book has a finite amount of information that you can absorb at a glance.

The golden ratio in the design field (1.6180) is found so often in nature and used as a design principal - the rule of thirds. But these don’t apply online because the web runs on a single fixed dimension (or on user defined or content defined space). You can’t look at design online through the lens of print because we are dealing with a different medium. Jason gives the example of the book of short stories No-one Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July. To promote her book, Miranda created a linear web design which completely captivates the interest of the user because it is such an unusual technique.

Fray is a new type of interactive story telling site where the design/graphic of the site takes over the narrative. Jason says this is a simple, subtle and clever way to use web design. He recommends the book Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird as a source of inspiration.

Images are written with light, Jason says. Innovation makes new information available to the masses. Most stuff on the web is a bit like the first Model T Ford. You can have any color you like, provided it’s black. Well, it’s time to start looking for new colors, he says. Until now, design for the web has been driven by technology rather than by the masses. Jason thinks that the form of web design should be driven by the story you’re trying to tell and he thinks we need to separate the design from the CMS. We’re all capable of telling a story and we don’t need a design degree to do this. Find inspiration offline in magazines, books and history. Turn your web site into a story.