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The Google Duplicate Content Penalty: the Truth

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

The truth of the Google duplicate content penalty is quite simply that there is none! If that confuses you, then you have been reading too many misinformed forums or blogs where people get stuck on some popular term that they have no idea what it means, and then profess to be experts.

The only experts on the Google duplicate content penalty, and the only people who are qualified to define it, are Google, and in Google’s own words “There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty”. This comes directly from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.

That should be the end of this article, at precisely 96 words excluding title as I define my word count. But it is not. Why? Because even though this blog is operated by Google, and even though much the same has been stated by Matt Cutts, Google’s main software engineer, and other Google experts, people still argue and complain about the Google ‘duplicate content penalty’.

10 Ways to Get Banned by the Search Engines

By Terri Seymour in Featured

When you build your website, you, of course, want to get high rankings in the search engines.  There are lots of ways to do this and lots of ways to NOT do this.  Below are 10 things to avoid if you want to be in good standing with the search engines.

1. Duplicate Content/Sites – Do not set up multiple sites or site pages using basically the same content with a few different keywords spread around.  This does not fool the search engines.
2. Cloaking – Cloaking is when a website or webpage is set up to show different content for a search engine spider than the human visitors.   The cloaked page (for the spiders) is stuffed with keywords in an attempt to get higher rankings.  What it can get you is banned!
3. Linking to Bad Neighborhoods – Be careful who you link to because you can be found guilty by association.   Do not link to adult sites, gambling sites or link farms.  Also be careful not to link to sites that use any of the SEO methods mentioned here.
4. Title Stacking – This is simply trying to give each page more than one title tag so you can use more keywords to get higher rankings.   The search engines consider this a dirty little trick.
5. Doorway Pages – Doorway or gateway pages are pages that are set-up for one keyword topic but then they take you to different content.   These pages usually have little value in the way of content and have little to do with the rest of the site.  They are used solely to try to get a higher rank in the search engines.
6. Redirect Pages – Redirect pages are set up to rank high in the search engines but when you click on the page, it will take you to another page which is usually a sales page for a product or service.  So, what you see isn’t what you get!
7. Automated Submission Services – Do not use automated submission services.  They are against Google’s TOS and can get you banned.
8. Hidden Links – This is when a link is added to a page in such a small size that it cannot be seen by human visitors but can be picked up by the search engine spiders.   This might work for a time but when the search engines discover it, you will be penalized!
9. Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing or spamming is simply being too repetitive with your keywords as to the extent of your content not being sensible.  For example if your keywords are cat food and your text reads something like this:  When your cat gets hungry be sure to feed them this cat food because your cat will like this cat food.  This cat food comes in an easy to open cat food can and contains fish, chicken and healthy ingredients that all cat food should have.  So, when your cat is hungry for cat food, give them this cat food because this cat food is the best cat food for your cat!You can easily see why this kind of keyword stuffing should not be used.
10. Invisible Text – This is when you hide text by using the same color text and background.   The invisible text is meant for the search engines only and not for visitors.  This is done so you can stuff a lot more keywords on your page without wrecking your content.  The search engines will discover this and they will penalize you!

Be careful not to use these Black Hat SEO methods because it could cause you a lot of trouble with the search engines.  Be careful as well, who you hire to work on your site because some of these things can be done without your knowledge and cause your site to get banned or penalized.

A few things you should do to get higher rankings are:

1. Research keywords and use relevant keywords on your web pages and in your page title.
2. Add new content to your site regularly
3. Link with relevant, quality sites
4. Use a site map
5. Don’t use a lot of javascript or flash.  The search engines do not read these.

Following all of the above can keep you from getting banned and improve your rankings!

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Terri Seymour (also known as “The eBook Lady”) has over ten years online experience and has helped many people start their own business.  Visit her site at http://www.seymourproducts.com for resources, $1 resell ebooks & software, free tutorials, affiliate programs, free ezine and free business ebook with Master Resell Rights. http://www.seymourproducts.com/free.shtml

The Tricky Issue Of Duplicate Content & What Google Says About It

By Titus Hoskins in Featured

Being a full-time online marketer means you have to keep a close watch on how Google is ranking pages on the web… one very serious concern is the whole issue of duplicate content. More importantly, how does having duplicate content on your own site and on other people’s sites, affect your keyword rankings in Google and the other search engines?

Don’t Worry About Duplicate Content If You Have An Authority Content Web Site

By B Hopkins in Featured

The duplicate content issue has gone back and forth on the Internet for the last several years now. There are camps that have been saying that your web site will be penalized if you have duplicate content, to the camps that are saying your web site won’t gain any benefit if it has duplicate content on it, to those that say that you shouldn’t worry about it at all. With all of these opinions flying around over the Internet, which camp should you pitch your tent in?

The basic answer is there really is no duplicate content penalty outside of your own web site. There are undesirable side effects in the search engines if your website has duplicate pages, however this article focuses on duplicate content between 2 different websites. Your web site may not benefit much if you have duplicate content (duplicate content means that your entire web page content is basically the same as another web page). However there are ways to use content on your website that is used on other web sites and not have it look like duplicate content to the search engines, but that is another article. If you don’t want to worry about duplicate content in any way shape or form, then having an authority content web site is the way to go.

Authority sites are sites that the search engines see as being an authority in any subject or niche. A good example of an authority site is answer.com. The search engines see this web site as being an authority in a number of different niche areas, and as a result many pages on the answer.com site rank highly in all types of search results. Even if it has the same content that is found on other web sites.

What is the result of this exercise? If you have an authority site, the search engines will rank your site higher than other sites with the exact same content, even if your site has posted the content after other web sites. This is insightful information because now there is finally definitive proof to create quality content websites.

So what are some of the characteristics of an authority content web site? The first is that it is a high quality web site that has key word related content in a specific niche. Content is also routinely updated and added to the site. Many blogs end up being authority sites, because they are constantly updated and usually tightly focused to a specific niche. Authority sites may also have a list of resources, keep a list of events, or have reviews and links to other sites (an example of this type of authority site is teleseminarlive.com). A good way to think of an authority web site is to ask yourself if you would use this site as a resource in any way, or would recommend it to someone else. If your answer is yes, then you can bet that the website is on it’s way towards being considered as an authority site by the search engines if it isn’t considered one already.

Authority content websites are the way to go if you don’t want to worry about duplicate content. They are simple to create but take some time to build up to become an authority site. They are not something that you can build overnight with automated software. So if you are looking for a quick fix, authority sites are not for you. If you are interested in building a long term asset that will be loved by the search engines, then you should join one of the membership web sites that properly teach you how to create authority web sites.

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B. Hopkins writes on Internet Business Strategies, how to create websites that generate residual income and also reviews on related products and services. Discover how you can create high quality authority sites quickly. Get answers to your frequently asked web content and article questions on this web content expert blog.

Duplicate Content and What You Should Know

By Robert Cerff in Featured

Is duplicate content penalty a myth or a reality?  Well I would say that it’s a bit of both.  Many folk have been terrorised into paranoia over duplicate content, but here are the facts.

“Duplicate content is bad.”

Okay, so I said it.  But please note that I didn’t say that it’s evil or that your web pages are certainly heading to supplemental hell.  But duplicate content can be bad for the following reasons.

1. Multiple copies of the same content are not useful to the internet as a whole
2. Multiple copies of the same content on your website could dilute your “link juice”
3. Multiple copies of the same content can hamper effective indexing of your website.
4. Multiple copies of the same content will confuse the search engines as to which copy may be the original.

Multiple copies are not useful to the internet.  Okay so we often turn on the TV only to find that while there are over 100 channels on offer there’s still nothing on.  But imagine if out of the 100 channels there were only really 8 to choose from, the others were simply showing the same thing as on the others.  Duplicate content works in the same way.  It serves us the same content on all the channels.  The search engines quickly realised that good content ranks but that the same content shouldn’t fill all choices.  This is the real penalty of duplicate content.  The same content shouldn’t rank over and over because if it doesn’t meet the searcher’s needs then they wouldn’t have another option.

From the average webmaster’s point of view I would say that point 2 is the most important.  Can you imagine having 3 or 4 pages all with great content, but the same content, being indexed and linked to from related websites?  Sounds great, but if it is the same content then you have effectively shared the full linking power of that content over multiple pages.  So in this case instead of having one page showing up on the first page of the search results, you now have 2 on the second.  I know which scenario I would prefer.  The other side of the coin is with dynamic URLs you may find that several different dynamic formulas may take you to the same product page.  Again this could be seen as duplicate content by the search engines and with this may come the uncertainty as to which one to rank.  Quite often this will result in the relegation of both of those URLs to a lower rank.  Although I have a sneaky suspicion that the search engines are catching onto the dynamic URL problem and now will rank one page from a website and simply ignore the others.

Should you have multiple versions of the same content on your website as can often be the case of dynamic URLs then this may prevent the search engines from indexing your whole website.  Imagine once again you are searching through the TV channels and the first 10 are all the same, you may continue searching and reach channel 20.  If by this time you’re still searching then you must be really bored.  The Bots don’t have time to get bored, if it reaches page 10 and all the content seems the same it will assume that the rest aren’t worth indexing.  This could be a problem.  Added to this if it deems none of your pages worth indexing you could face a massive uphill battle to have your pages indexed, never mind ranking highly.

Originality is a difficult one because with no way of being able to certify that you were the first to post the content the search engines rely on the speed with which it was indexed.  Indexing of websites takes place at different rates.  Blogs generally are crawled and indexed a lot more frequently than a website that shows updates once a month on average.  In this case if you had added great quality content to your website only to have a blogger scrape it, you might lose the full benefit of this content as the blog may be indexed and be recognised as having first published it.  While this is an extreme example it is a good reason to regularly update your website to keep the search bots coming back regularly.

As you can see from the points above there is no definite penalty for duplicate content.  But for reasons that make good logical sense many times these pages simply don’t cut it at the highest level.  The question you should always be asking is, “will this benefit my visitors?” or even, “Will this impact negatively on my visitors?”  The answer to that question should quickly send you in the right direction and keep you from possible pitfalls.

Robert Cerff is a search engine analyst and marketing consultant for Prop Data Internet Solutions. He has ten years experience in e-commerce, online marketing and web development. http://www.propdata.co.za

To Use or Not To Use? Duplicate Content

By Andy MacDonald in Featured

Duplicate content is a hotly debated issue when it comes to how it affects your web-site ranking. And it’s become an even bigger issue over time as spammers and other malicious Internet users have taken to the practice of content scraping, or scraping the content from a web site to use on their own with only minor changes to the appearance, not to the content itself.

Content scraping has become such a problem that search engines now look for duplicate copy, even when it’s hidden behind a link like the Similar Pages that Google uses for related content. If they find it, your site may be lowered in the rankings or even delisted completely.

Still, the duplicate-copy issue isn’t as simple as it may seem. Some people think there’s too much worry about it, whereas others insist the problem needs to be addressed. And both are right to some degree. Let me explain.

First, you need to understand that not all duplicate content is the same kind. You need to appreciate some differences.

• Reprints:This is duplicate content published on multiple sites with the permission of the copyright holder. These are the articles that you or others create and then distribute to create links back to your site or to sites that are relevant to the content of yours. Reprints are not bad duplicate content, but they can get your site thrown into the realm of Similar Pages, which means they’ll be buried behind other results.

• Site Mirroring: This is the kind of duplication that can cause one or more of your sites to be delisted from a search engine. Site mirroring is literally keeping exact copies of your web site in two different places on the Internet. Web sites used to practice site mirroring all the time as a way to avoid downtime when one site crashed. These days, server capabilities are such that site mirroring isn’t as necessary as it once was, and search engines now “dis-include” mirrored content because of the spamming implications it can have. Spammers have been known to mirror sites to create a false Internet for the purpose of stealing user names, passwords, account numbers, and other personal information.

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