10e20 Blog

As more businesses, small and large, bring their products and services to the web, there is a growing concern about duplicate content. Duplicate content penalties can wreak havoc with your search engine rankings. There are many theories about how to avoid it, but for smaller website owners, some of these solutions require large budgets. The objective for this blog post is to provide some hints to help you identify, reduce and resolve your duplicate content issues!

What goes through your mind when you read about the silly lawsuits against Google accessing portions of your website? What do you think when you visit the Internet Wayback Machine and find hundreds of pages of your site in its full form (almost)? Most of you wonder what is going on in the minds of these clueless people. Don’t they understand how the web works?

That’s right, folks. In case you’re not in the know, the web works in a certain way. A brand new site generally does not get indexed in search engines for a period of months. Over time, the search spiders find your site and your interlinked pages begin getting crawled. Eventually, someone will search for something and your website will hopefully come up.

Kevin Gibbons tagged me with an interesting little meme he started and since he’s a loyal reader of 10e20, here goes:

My first job right out of college, I went to work for a web design start-up. It was started by 4 guys with a lot of money and absolutely no clue about web design or really even the Internet in general. They wanted to get richer and thought this woould be a good way (at this time the original RazorFish was worth billions, Organic was trading at obscene amounts, etc). I stayed with the company for awhile but just got so sick of them not having a clue and wasting people’s money. So I left… I wanted to do something different…

Good advice does not necessarily have a single application. Solid advice can be “recycled” and used for a variety of situations. In January, I wrote how advice for startups can be applied to marketing a website. A recent post I read applied advice in human resources to SEO. I want to take that post and go the next step: into the world of social media.

This post highlights four main points, all of which have applications just about anywhere when you are looking to become active in the social media world and to have the sites that people care to share.

Lesson 1: Attract Attention

The key to being discovered is having something that attracts attention. Whether you write a list post, a how-to, or you gather a collection of viral photos, the key is about writing something that captivates your audience, whoever they may be. The title needs to grab the eye. Graphics can even further help the cause. Do something different. An old post by Robert Scoble about blogger Kathy Sierra resounds in my mind almost every time I write a blog post.

Don’t think the rich and famous lose sleep at night after a Google vanity search returns unfavorable results? Think again.

A few months back, a particular celebrity called me, out of the blue, looking to hire someone to help him sleep better at night. Apparently a certain result for his name on a Google query, was causing him much distress. He felt that the search result, a blog post, attacked him in a way that was so malicious and unfair, and that his professional reputation was in jeopardy. He obtained my phone number through a friend of a friends, cousin, twice removed (a little exaggeration there) - who told him I might be able to help with this sort of stuff. He asked me if I could remove the malicious post - I told him I could not - but can possible bury it into the deep abyss of the Google index. He found favor in my solution, and so our journey began.

Creating strong web site content is an anchor for long term site success and optimization. What do I mean by content? Content is essentially interesting, original articles about your business and industry. What do I mean by “interesting”? Your content must be original and unique so that site visitors to want to read and learn something from it and others web publishers will view it as an authority resource to link to.

There are no shortcuts to creating great content for your web site. The best content takes time to generate and is created the old fashion way with strong, factual research, drafting methods, revisions and finally, great presentation and layout for the web. You must be an expert in your subject matter, have research sources at your fingertips and creative efforts to back you.

Remember that Uncle Sam poster where his finger points directly at you no matter where you are standing? Well it looks like Google is taking over for ol’ Sammy and pointing it’s omnipotent finger at every person on the net who is buying links. What am I talking about? This weekend Google engineer Matt Cutts, made a few posts (1, 2, 3 to be exact) about paid links. Aaron Wall started off a great discussion over at Threadwatch and grabbed some key parts from Matt’s posts:

Start with this:

As long as we’re talking about links, this seems like a pretty good opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how to tell if a paid link violates search engines’ quality guidelines. If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. … I wanted to give a heads-up because Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future.

Fresh content is a very important asset for the growth and popularity of your site. There are many reasons why this is important.

First and foremost, having fresh content benefits your link juice. The more you write, the more opportunity you have to be linked to. I wouldn’t say to take the Twitter approach, however. When writing an article, write something of substance. Write something longer than that — but not too long so as not to neglect your readers. If your content actually requires great length, break it up into small pieces and link to each other in subsequent articles, making sure you link appropriately to refer them to a previous related article. Create a series of related posts. This works in blogging as well. Michael Gray recently did a series on local search. If you have not seen his vast interview coverage, I urge you to check it out to get an idea of how he did it.

Proper keyword research is the foundation of a successful search marketing campaign. Work with the wrong keywords and you can run your campaign into the ground resulting in negative campaign ROI (Return on Investment) – or worse yet LOI (Loss on Investment).

For marketers conducting keyword research, some of the following questions arise:

• Should you rely on free tools?
• Should you subscribe to a paid keyword research tool?
• Should you hire an SEO / SEM firm to conduct the research for you?
• And, in the end, what tools and sources can you trust most? Which tools and methods are most reliable?

If there’s one request that I always cringe at, it’s to disable a site because a customer decides that it is in his best financial interest to “close shop.” Later, if we own the domain name and get notifications about its upcoming expiration date, the customer may already be long gone and is not reachable with any contact information we may have for them.

I can’t say this has happened a lot, but it isn’t unrealistic either. If there’s one thing you should keep when you decide to shut down your business, it’s your domain name (and let’s hope you grabbed your website files too). But why? Believe it or not, it’s an important element for ranking in search engine optimization.