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Tuesday, June 05, 2007
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Exclusive Video: If you optimize your site with respect to the search engine industry, I'm sure you are aware of the specter of duplicate content. Even accidentally repeated content can cause ranking issues, something we are all trying to avoid.
 At the Seattle SMX Conference, our own Mike McDonald caught with Google engineer
extraordinaire
Matt Cutts to discuss this very issue. Cutts himself acknowledges
duplicate
content is an interesting dilemma even for Google to tackle, something he indicates while discussing the concept of content reclamation:
"You always have to worry about how it can be spammed. What if someone innocent doesn't claim their content and then and smart spammer comes along and claims everybody else's content... That's a tricky thing."
>>> Watch Matt Cutts on duplicate content...
The second session from the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle was focused on the issue of duplicate content.
Eytan Seidman, Lead Program Manager, Live Search, Microsoft said you should be concerned with duplicate content on your site because it fragments your pages in some way. In order to avoid duplicate content, he said to keep session parameters simple.
For local sites he recommended having unique content on them and if you don't have different content, you most likely don't need multiple pages.
To avoid people copying your content, he said to tell people that are going to use your content to attribute.
Peter Linsley, Senior Product Manager for Search, at Ask.com gave a standard definition of duplicate content saying it was the same content on multiple urls. The reason it is bad for search engines is because users do not want to see the same content result.
As for avoiding duplicate content you should use copyright or creative commons notice. Also make the content unique and difficult to be taken out of context.
Amit Kumar, Senior Engineering Manager, Yahoo Search, said that Yahoo tries to crawl links from duplicate, less; so fewer visits from the crawler could mean that the content may be considered duplicated.
He added if you get content from somewhere else you should attribute.
Vanessa Fox, Google, Product Manager weighed in on duplicate content saying they want to show unique information so they want to avoid duplicated information.
If you have pages that are fairly similar, you may want to consider combining the two. In some cases, pages that are similar just need to be distinguished from one another a bit more.
On client site redirects, she said a 301 is considered a client side redirect because the client is actually taken from one page to another and the crawler can see the message.
On search engines reaching out to Word Press and blog software types to avoid duplicate content, she said there is a lot they can do as far as working with the CMS software people to come up with better solutions so end users won't have to worry about duplicate content.
| Article by Mike Sachoff, who writes about ebusiness for WebProNews. |
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Rob Gabriel On MyLiveSearch
Compiled By Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews
By now, I'm sure most of you have heard about the newest Google killer, MyLiveSearch. When news about the upcoming launch broke, many reports ran with the idea the MLS would be the one to knock Google from their rock-solid pedestal. However, like Doug Caverly pointed out in his WPN article, this hype may have been misguided.
Abby Prince of WebProNews conducted a phone interview with MLS founder Rob Gabriel, who clarified some of the information other news companies reported.
For starters, Gabriel discussed that MLS functions as a browser plugin and works off another engine's search results. Gabriel explains further:
This tool allows you rely on what's there and improve the results that are there and give you results in real-time. You're not doing a search on the database, you are doing a search on what's actually on the web now.
When asked about being the Google killer, Gabriel clarified somethings, saying MLS was not designed in this manner and that while it is a competitor, MLS and Google work in two different ways, "It's not designed to do that. We are trying to get people to use it with what they do everyday, but just to improve what they do as a result."
Article by Chris Richardson, a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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Is This Ethical?
Danny Sullivan says: Incrediblehelp dropped me an email asking me to comment on this thread.
I came over, read the comments and kind of scratched my head. Comment
about what? That CSS can be used to hide text? Sure, that's been known
for ages. That hiding text using CSS can be considered spam or a poor
man's version of cloaking? Sure, that's also been known for ages. I've
written about it plenty of times. This isn't something new that people
can do. It's something old that people have been doing for ages.
Still scratching my head, I then wondered, "Wait a minute. Is this about my site?" Surely not. But yep, there in our style sheet was the damning code. It's true. We were totally hiding text and technically might be considered spamming the search engines. Curses -- just when I hoped not to be counted among those other search spammers like Google and Yahoo that have been outed for using hidden text.
It was really confusing because I didn't think we used H1s in the site. We use H2s for our headlines. Then I found it. H1 we use as a replacement for those who don't have stylesheets and images on. Specifically, we use it to put the words "Search Engine Land by Danny Sulllivan" at the top of our pages, like this:
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