OK, I was a bit wrong. Not 100% wrong, but a bit wrong. Let me explain…

Firstly, here is Matt Cutts’ latest post on PageRank sculpting.

Now rather than write a whole new article on this, here is my comment on Matt’s blog.

*******

Matt,

Before I start this, I am using the term ‘PageRank’ as a general term fully knowing that this is not a simple issue and ‘PageRank’ and the way it is calculated (and the other numerous methods Google use) are multidimensional and complex. However, if you use PageRank to imply ‘weight’ it make it a lot simpler. Also, ‘PageRank sculpting’ (in my view) is meant to mean ‘passing weight you can control’. Now… on with the comment!

As I have always said, Google makes the rules and needs to make those rules fit with what it wants to do and also change them when needed to fit with the changes that happen on the web.

Just like the new structure on JavaScript links and them now carrying weight and being crawlable, the PageRank sculpting change is understandable. Google now can and wants to index more of the web (JavaScript link change). Google wants to reverse a method that can only help people in the know (PageRank sculpting change). Logically, all is very understandable.

However, where the JavaScript link change is evolution, the PageRank sculpting change in not. Let me explain.

Using ‘nofollow’ on untrusted (or unknown trust) outbound links is sensible and I think that in general this is a good idea. Like wise using it on paid links is cool (the fact that all those people are now going to have to change from JavaScript to this method is another story…). I also believe that using ‘nofollow’ on ‘perfunctory’ pages is also good. How many times in the past did you search for your company name and get you home page at number one and your ‘legals’ page at number two. Now, I know that Google changed some things and now this is less prominent, but it still happens. As much as you say that these pages are ‘worthy’, I don’t agree that they are in terms of search engine listings. Most of these type of pages (along with the privacy policy page) are legal ease that just need to be on the site. I am not saying they are not important, they are (privacy policies are really important for instance), but, they are not what you site is about. Because they are structurally important they are usually linked from every pages on the site and as such gather a lot of importance and weight. Now, I know that Google must have looked at this, but I can still find lots of examples where these type of pages get too much exposure on the search listings. This is apart from the duplicate content issues (anyone ever legally or illegally ‘lifted’ some legals or privacy words from another site?).

In my view there is nothing wrong with saying ‘hey Google, these pages are not important from a search engine perspective, let me not give them so much weight’. Regardless of how Google now views these type of pages from a weight perspective, doing the above as a webmaster should be logical and encouraged. You have said this yourself at least a few times in the past.

Likewise, ‘nofollowing’ your archive pages on your blog. Is this really a bad thing? You can get to the pages from the ‘tag’ index or the ‘category’ index, why put weight to a page that is truly navigational. At least the tag and category pages are themed. Giving weight to a page that is only themed by the date is crazy and does not really help search engines deliver ‘good’ results (totally leaving aside the duplicate content issues for now).

To finish, I guess I want to make two points (which do have some embedded questions too), namely:

1. Now that we know that weight/PageRank/whatever will disappear (outside of the intrinsic wastage method that Google applies) when we use a ‘nofollow’ link, what do you think this will do to linking patterns? This is really a can of worms from an outbound linking and internal linking perspective. Will people still link to their ‘legals’ page from every page on their site? Turning comments ‘off’ will also be pretty tempting. I know this will devalue the sites in general, but we are not always dealing with logic here are we? (if we were you (as head of the web spam team) wouldn’t of had to change many things in the past. Changing the PageRank sculpting thing just being one of them).

2. Was there really a need to make this change? I know all sites should be equally capable of being listed in search engines without esoteric methods playing a part. But does this really happen anyway (in search engines or life in general)? If you hire the best accountant you will probably pay less tax than the other guy. Is that really fair? Also, if nobody noticed the change for a year (I did have an inkling, but was totally and completely in denial) then does that mean the change didn’t have to be made in the first place? As said, we now have a situation where people will probably make bigger and more damaging changes to their site and structure, rather than add a little ‘nofollow’ to a few links.

All in all, PageRank sculpting (or whatever we should call it) didn’t really rule my world. But, I did think that it was a totally legitimate method to use. Now that we know the ‘weight’ leaks, this will put a totally new (and more damaging) spin on things. Could we not have just left the ‘weight’ with the parent page? This is what I thought would happen most of the time anyway.

Still, I guess all of this keeps us all in a job, so we should not complain too much! However, I think you guys have got this one wrong and we will see in the next weeks and months how people jump on this.

P.S. having turned on the ‘nofollow’ indicator plug in on Firefox a long time ago, I have seen some of the abuse on this. However, I still don’t think that this way is the best method to combat this. You could of just ‘downgraded’ the trust score on sites that had abused the ‘nofollow’ thing to silly levels.

*******

In essence, I think this is just the start on some changes on this and let’s see how this develops in the next few weeks. Four things are sure in my mind, namely:

1. The ‘dofollow’ tag will come to the fore (if I am going to lose the ‘weight’ you might as well have it!).
2. The linking to ‘legals’, ‘privacy’, etc. pages will now be more sporadic.
3. Google have made a change that will affect website structure. This is either what they intended or a by-product.
4. Sites will link less.

Fun times… things have been a bit boring or late and this spice things up quite nicely!

I didn’t realise this was going on. I am a bit behind with my reading.

In essence, Matt Cutts mentioned some things that has put some panic in the SEO community about ‘nofollow’ and PageRank sculpting.

Danny Sullivan puts together a good post on the two biggest things to come out of the SMX Advanced event. Namely, Google now following JavaScript and Flash links and the PageRank sculpting ho-ha.

Here is also a funny post and video from Dan Thies (who was at the event in the actual room) about the PageRank sculpting saga. Also, on this page is a complex (but worth reading) post from (PageRank sculting pioneer) Leslie Rohde about PageRank and what he thinks about it all.

In essence, do you really think that:

1. PageRank can disappear (maybe a little bit, I guess; nothing is perfect. But no way that lots of it will)
2. PageRank flows to ‘nofollows’ (nope, not a chance)
3. PageRank flows equally to the ‘dofollow’ links (no, not really. In the same way that I don’t think it flows equally to internal and external links. However, I am pretty sure the ‘dofollow’ links on a page will get more weight than they would if there were no ‘nofollow’ links on the page)
4. PageRank sometimes just stays with the parent page rather than leak, disappear or transfer (I think this will be the case on many occasions)

All in all, don’t have sleepless nights on this one all you SEO PageRank sculpters. PageRank disappearing en masse would be just plain daft.

However, Matt you really need to respond on this one and get this sorted out…

Just enjoy…

www.booneoakley.com

Oh, also I linked to them (with a ‘dofollow’) just because I really liked it. Maybe they know more about SEO than they think they do (or I think they do!).

I always look closely at all of Google’s new tools. How I wish that Google Squared was around when I was at school!

Apart from the ways it can save you time in starting an information collection based activity or project, have a think about it from a link building persepctive.

Do you think the information sources Google lists here are trusted? Wade through the Wiki links and you will find some real gems that you may not have uncovered before. As Google adds to this project this will grow and grow.

Apart from sounding like a children’s book about frogs or rabbits or both (hey, look out for the animated film too; Tom Hanks is the voice for the Flash character!), Google, JavaScript and Flash now have a slightly different relationship.

This is a slow evolution based upon Google’s need to index the web like no one else could even dream about. This brings its own pressures and the need to index Flash (lot of pages) well is needed and the need to follow JavaScript links (more than you can count on ten abacuses and all your fingers) is even greater.

Rather than me talk about this, here is a fantastic post from Vanessa Fox on Google, JavaScript and Flash and some other stuff. Well (well) worth a read.

In essence, please don’t see that as a green light to do silly things (build your site in Flash, only have JavaScript links, etc.), but it certainly does open up some good possibilities.

P.S. clearly I was only joking about the new book and film. But Tom, if you are reading this, are you interested?

All you devotees of ‘advanced search’ in Google will not see tuns of new things here. But, the way Google have put together ‘Search Options’ is good and makes the process a lot quicker. Also, the ‘wheel thing’ (can’t remember the exact name, looks like a kind of mind map to me) is great for keyword brain storming research.

For link building and keyword ideas it is a really cool tool that will help and save some time.

Take a look…

As a rule, changing any element of an established URL and URL structure on your site is a no no. I can’t think of any reason for this to be a good idea. However, sometimes this does become necessary.

I had an occasion today to change one of the URLs on one of my affiliate sites, buy bags, wallets, purses, luggage (shameless plug and keyword crazy anchor text… sorry). I noticed that in my link to Wheeled Luggage & Bags (sorry again, I will stop now) I had only put ‘wheeled’ in the query string and this was only bringing up about a third of the results that it could. So I needed to add ‘wheel’ to the query string too, which also meant that the URL would change.

The site hasn’t been up that long so it wasn’t an agonising decision to change the URL (if you are even thinking of changing a URL for a long established and search engine traffic generating page, think again). However, using the usual 301 redirect rule (redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm) in the .htaccess file didn’t work.

So, I had to do some digging around and realised I had to go deeper into mastering regular expressions (great article, but pour yourself a cup of tea first). After some playing I found that something like this worked:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^q=wheeled$
RewriteRule ^search6.php$ http://www.walletandpurse.co.uk/search6.php?q=wheel+wheeled [L,R=301]

As you can guess you can also use something like this to redirect a whole pile of dynamic URLs too (only for a fresh site though please!).

As a word of warning, please only play with this in a safe environment or with expert advice. Don’t mess with all this stuff unless you are completely sure of what you are doing. However, done correctly and in the right circumstances being able to redirect a pre-existing dynamic URL is a good tool to have in your armoury.

Well, free as in you don’t need to buy any software, etc. Or anything in fact.

Here it is…

1. Pick one of your competitors on the web who are doing better than you for your chosen search term (better to choose one of your less competitive terms/competitors for this tip).
2. Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and input their URL and hit ‘Explore URL’.
3. Choose the ‘inlinks’ tab.
4. In the ‘show inlinks’ on the first drop down menu choose ‘except from this domain’ and on the second choose ‘entire site’.
5. Now click ‘Export first 1000 results to TSV’ (you may have more than 1000 in your list, but Yahoo will only give you access this way to the first 1000. You can play around with some different search parameters to distill this some more. However, as mentioned before a more ‘niche’ area and picking a competitor with less than a 1000 results would be better).
6. Once you have the TSV file you can open it in Excel or the spreadsheet programme of your choice.
7. Now have a play around. Use your imagination! Think about what you can do with this data. As an example you could do a search for the competitors name and this will find the page titles and pages that mention (and are usually dedicated) to that company. This is usually either a directory you could assess the worth of or even better it might be a website that takes outside content and will be prepared to give you a page.

There are a lot of programmes out there that help you do things like this too. However, I just thought that if you are sitting there wondering what you could devote half an hour of link building time to and is FREE, then this could get you going.

Good linking…

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about using the tag ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ on both internal and external links.

The best answer I can come up with is to look at the Google explanation here. They say that they don’t follow ‘nofollow’ links and not just not pass on PageRank (there are rumours that this is not strictly true, but I am happy to believe it is true enough).

With this in mind, the new ‘rel=”canonical”‘ header tag can help with allowing Google to spider as much of your site as it can (within reason, they won’t stay for as long as you want them to), but not leave PageRank juice all over the place (messy…).

As mentioned before, even your ‘noindex’ pages still carry PageRank and even though they will be passing a lot of this out they will still retain a bit. So the new tag really helps with large product sites with various results pages and various ways of ordering those results. Basically, you can now get the products pages spidered without dropping page rank on all of the search results pages. You still have to be a tad clever though with your dynamic URL insert into the ‘canonical’ tag.

Also, as mentioned in the Google post even though they don’t follow ‘nofollow’ you can still put these pages in the search engine sitemap if you want Google to find and index them. This answers the PageRank sculpting question with regards to ‘legals’, ‘privacy policy’, ect. pages which you don’t want to hoard PageRank but you still want Google to know you have them.

As we know there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. However, duplicate content is a real issue for both search engines and those who wish to do well in this area.

The big three (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) rarely get together on general standards, but when they do it is worth taking note. All three have a problem cutting through the mess that is the world-wide web and trying to archive it into something that is usable for us all. A big issue in this respect is the amount of duplication the web throws up. This sits in two main areas…

1. The plagiarism that inherently exists on the web e.g. “ooh, that is a good article, I will use that on my site”, etc.
2. Websites that duplicate information either intentionally or unintentionally.

The later category is the one that the big three (mainly Google) have been trying for a long while to mitigate. Fortunately, the “pet insurance london”, “pet insurance cardiff”, etc. which were all basically the same page, but with different Meta and H1 tags problem has been dealt with pretty much (some are still out there though!). Also, data sorting on page (e.g. sort by price, etc.) which generates lots of very similar pages all with different URLs (i.e. usually with the “?sort=” parameter is slowly being tackled. Yahoo, also have a parameter based URL removal tool in their site explorer suite.

The recent announcement helps with issues 1 (not at all as you can’t use this tag for external domain pages) and 2 (yes) to try to help search engines and webmasters make sure that the real (and main) version of a web page is treated as the canonical (main and sort of only) one.

The addition is a tag for the head of your page which is…

link rel=”canonical” href=”The URL you want to be the main one for this web page”

As a rule it is not a bad idea to include this in all of your pages that you manually create (which includes ones that you create in WordPress, etc. – don’t worry there are some plugins available already). This means that if these pages get tagged with a differnet URLs in one way or another, at least the search engine know what you meant to be the main one. Also, if you create intentional duplicate content (landing pages, etc.) then you can use this tag to help you to not confuse the search engines.

The plagiarism one is still something that the search engines will have to deal with themselves. Also, if you are creating multiple pages (with different URLs) from a database source (feed, CMS, etc.) then this will only help you if you can incorporate a dynamic element into the ‘rel’ tag that picks the canonical URL for you. This will work as a good alternative to the ‘noindex’/'nofollow’ way which (was) my favoured method.

It is well to remember that this is not a panacea. You should still look to rationalise your URLs and ensure that they are not duplicated and indexed. Remember, you are still passing PageRank (well, the links you don’t ‘nofollow’ anyway) to any page you link to on your site (even the ‘noindex’ pages), so (still) make sure you are not giving away credit to meaningless pages.

However, overall the is really good and especially so since it creates a ’301 redirect’ environment (so the good stuff gets passed back to the original page too) and therefor better than ‘noindex’ in many ways. Remember this will only work on your domain and links between these pages (i.e. you can’t use the tag to external domains from the domain you are working on).

If used well this is an excellent addition to your SEM efforts.

Here is a really interesting post from the official Google blog.

It goes into some detail about some of the user testing and eye tracking Google are doing. The post looks at some of the differences that have occured since Google introduced universal search into its search results.

Also, if you look at the search results heatmap you can see how important the top two entries are in Google’s search results. Also, you can definately understand why Google puts more and more sponsored results above the search results as well as to the right. It must be ever so tempting for them to lessen their quality guidelines to allow more and more ads to make their way to this sweetest of spots.

Lastly, if you don’t already, this is a good time to branch out into picture and video search engine optimisation. You are missing a big win here and youe definately are if any of the search terms you would like to be listed for have an inherant visual element (just like ‘how to tie a tie’).

P.S. if you want to do some of your own (not eye but mouse pointer) heatmaps and user tracking, visit ClickTale. They have a fantastic tool that allows you to see a Flash movie of how your visitors have interacted with your site (what they click on, how long them spend on the page, where their mouse goes, etc.). The entry version is free and I would highly recommend having a look.

Here is a good post from the Google Webmaster Blog about open redirects and how redirects as a parameter in your URLs can harm your Google ranking.

As we know Google has to (and it can’t stop) indexing or at least assessing all it sees. It (as well as all the other search robots) trawls the web in search of pages, links, sites, etc. In doing this it follows all the routes it can (or rather, is ethically allowed to).

This means that if it is OK for it to do so (i.e. it can gain access and is allowed) it will seek and find many (many) different ways to find those all important web pages that keeps it ahead of the competition and up to date. This means that proxy servers and indeed server logs can be open to these information hungry creatures (OK, I hung on for as long as I could before I personalised a search robot, sorry…).

So, taking this into account if you are a victim of someone using your URL as a cloak to get people to click on a link on the web or an email link e.g. www.yoursite.com/go.php?url=www.badsite.com. Then don’t be surprised if Google finds this (and as mentioned it can be just because someone has clicked on the link from an e-mail and it is now stored on a proxy servers, etc. not just because the spammer has set up a web page with ‘click here’) and then indexes this URL. If it does and ‘www.badsite.com’ (great name isn’t it) is… well a ‘bad site’ with porn, malware, SEO black hat, whatever, etc… then unfortunately Google will probably take your site out of its index because of this. This is because you are and your site is (unwittingly) providing a bad URL to Google and this needs to be eradicated. If you are registered at Google Webmaster Central you will get a message telling you what they have done and some instruction on what to do next. If not you will probably be confused as to why your site has been dropped (best bet is to look at your server logs and see which pages on your site have been accessed or use the ‘site:www.yoursite.com’ command on Google with some date perameters added to filter for newly indexed pages).

Anyways, have a read of the article here and see if your site could be at risk.

Today, the speed and flow of information is staggering and certainly, in most parts of the world, we are (relatively) free to speak our minds. When we feel the urge there are also many different vehicles we can use to vent our pain, pleasure or problems.

So, what happens if you are a company and you, well, screw up? Also, you have had your chance to make amends and you, well, screwed that up too. What if the person who you screwed up with feels the urge to tell lots of people about their (bad) experience? What if they use the web to do it?

In essence you now have a really big problem. Little acorns, eh…

A good (or bad, whatever you viewpoint) example of this the old Land Rover one. You will probably have heard of this before, but it is worth recounting. Basically, a guy had such a bad experience with his purchace of a Land Rover Discovery that he set up this blog. The last time a checked (before today) this blog was sitting in position three on Google for the search ‘land rover’ and I think it had been in roughly that position for a year or so. How much business did that cost Land Rover? There is always the ‘all publicity is good publicity’ mantra; but really? In this case?

Anyway, this post isn’t really about customer services issues, etc. it is about what to do if you want to try to lessen the impact of negative search engine exposure and try to manage your search engine reputation. So, when the stuff hits the (search engine) fan, what to do?

Well, looking again at the Land Rover example, the search engine reults for ‘land rover’ now look like this. Today and for my search (taking into account all the personalised search that Google does) the ‘have your say’ blog is at number nine on the natural search. Still pretty prominent!

What can Land Rover do? Well, (if they haven’t tried already) they could…

1. Run PPC adverts to put their side of the story. I am not sure what they have done to smooth over this but if they had, done something special to rectify the problem they could run an eye catching advert that says ‘we do something really special, blah, blah’, ‘UK MD personally checks all cars before delivery’, ‘free biscuit with every £40k car’, whatever…
2. Make sure you have ‘company’ pages at all of ther most popular portal, wiki, social and networking sites like, Wikipedia, Facebook, My Space, Squidoo, StumbleUpon, Delicious, etc. Also, make sure it is good and there is a reason for people to join it and use it. If it becomes popular it will become relevant for a search on your company and take up one of those very important top ten positions.
3. Make great content for the web like videos, etc. and get these on to YouTube, etc. Again, if you do this well and it becomes popular then it will appear well in search results.
4. Create some nice and relevant sub domains. As we know Google views subdomains as a different site, so if you create fun.yourcompany.com or blog.yourcompany.com and ‘fun’ is fun and ‘blog’ is good and people like them (and you publicise and optimise them well) it will take up another place on the search results.
5. Make sure your deep link ratio is good and also you have a good ‘other’ page (not just your home page) that is optimised for your company name. If this page makes it to the top ten and your home page is number one (which, which let’s face it, it should be) then this little page will sit underneath it at number two. Nice.
6. Get your suppliers and partners on side and make sure they are optimising their site for your company name. This is a win-win obviously.
7. Make sure your web PR is good by making sure you (ethically and logically) use and issue news, press releases, white papers, comment on blogs, comment in forums and alike. This will do you no harm and also may help push some of these to a good search engine results position and get you a listing on the ‘news items’ parts of the Google results page.
8. For regional search results you can (carefully) use the contry related domain (e.g. the .co.uk or .co.fr or whatever as a sister site that has regional related elements, but (crucially) is different to the main site (so as not to duplicate the content). Obviously, this works if you are using the .com as your main domain. Alternatively, use the .com or .org, etc. in the same way (but not regionally, just with some different content, etc.) if you main domain is a country related one. As said use carefully, and think hard on this one (there are lots of potential issues and things to plan). But, this will work well if you do it right (and marketing/optimise it and have great content that can stand alone) it will definately grab a place in the top ten. Also, if you don’t own the domains… BUY THEM!

I guess alternatively, you could…

1. Do nothing!
2. Get someone else to do it for you…

If you choose number one, then you may regret this one day. If number two seems like a good option, I can help.

This is an add-on to my post on SEO Link Juice Leakage and deals with making your 404 error page a better experience for your user.

As mentioned in my previous article you should always ensure that you protect your pages from leaking juice (I really must try to think of a better term…) by…

1. Not changing the URLs at all
2. If you have to change URLs then make sure you 301 redirect all of them to the new pages (or if they don’t have a defined new page then the closest match or home page)

However, there will always be some pages that slip through the net and there will always be some people who key in the wrong page into the URL bar. This is where a nice and friendly 404 page will be a great help to your visitors.

Before we get started here, please remember that this will not help your SEO efforts, but it won’t hinder them either. You need to make the effort to deal individually with all the pages that you have changed URLs on and do a 301 redirect. This is the only way that, some or all of, the power (juice!) will not be lost and instead passed on to the new page.

The dangerous part of customising your 404 page is that it will create confusion for search engines. This is because many people who create a custom 404 error page allow it to return a ’200 OK’ header. This means that the page is actually alive and can be found and indexed by search engines.

So think of this scenario; you have a site that you have changed from a static site to a CMS based one. Your programmer either didn’t know or could be bothered to rewrite the URLs (in any case URL rewriting on this scale is a very delicate thing to do to get right), so you have a site that has completely changed its URL structure.

You think I know what I will do I’ll (or get my web guy to) create a 404 page that says something like:

• “sorry, we have changed our site and the page you want does not exist anymore, please click here to visit our home page”
• “we think you may want one of these pages” – and then list a few relevant pages that might be the best match

Even worse you may just set up a (302) redirect to the home page (from your 404 page!). There is an argument that directing the bulk of your pages with individual 301 redirects and then letting a 404 page handle all remaining redirects with a 301 redirect to the home page is an OK SEO way to do this. Well, as long as you really put the effort into redirecting your pages with this (the 301 redirect on your 404 page) element being the final bit taking up the slack, then it can be OK. However, from a user experience perspective it is better, in my view, to consentrate on doing a good job on your 301 redirects and then creating a (SEO friendly) 404 error page that will act as a guide for now and in the future.

So, what is the problem with letting your 404 page give a ’200 OK’ header? Well it means that any page that does not really exist (whether it existed before or is just a ‘keying error’ now has a life of its own and can be indexed by search engines. Basically, the search engine spider will visit the page and index what it finds, which means that you will have lots of pages that seem to be alive and well, but really don’t exist anymore. This will mean that your power (juice) will never be passed over to your shiny new pages and you will have a load of meaningless pages that will continue to take up the majority of the search bots time. Also, your pages will cease to be relevant for the things there were before (because they will all say something like “sorry, try this pages”, etc.) and will drop like a stone down the rankings. Not a good situation.

So, after all that… here is how I have found the best way to create your customised 404 page. Please bear in mind that this is an Apache sever solution (I will look at a IIS solution at a later date, but please feel free to suggest one if you have it).

Firstly, add a line to your .htaccess file like this:

ErrorDocument 404 /404error.html

Substitute your own 404 page’s URL for the ‘/404error.html’ bit. However, please remember not to use the full CNAME e.g. http://www.yoursite.co.uk/404error.html here or this will send the request to the web and create a ’200 OK’ header response instead of the “404 NOT FOUND” response we want.

You can then create your ’404error.html’ (or whatever you want to call it) to be anything you want. My preferred choice at the moment is to use the new 404 page creator feature on Google’s Webmaster Tools, that will create some Javascript code for you to drop into your normal page template that uses the details Google has of your site to help the user be redirected in a nice way.

So you get a customised 404 error page that returns a ’404 NOT FOUND’ code, helps your visitor get to where they want to go on your site AND does not confuse the life out of search engines by giving them an incorrect header code.

Before you ask I haven’t got around to doing it on this site yet… However, try putting in a few random characters at the end of the URL on this site here, Large Format Printers Samples. You will see what you can do with this approach. Also, if you check the header code for your mistyped URL here you will see that your 404 URL actually returns a ’404 NOT FOUND’ header code.

There is no such thing… end of post!

OK, it is not quite as simple as that, but it nearly is, here is my cut on this.

• Don’t have pages on your site that can be accessed from various URLs (a good example of this is www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com/index.html – two URLs, one page)
• Don’t have the same pages titles and Meta descriptions on all pages
• Don’t create a site that just scrapes content from the web
• If you are going to syndicate your material, make sure you change the content for each source
• If you can’t be bothered to do the above, make sure you post the content on your site first and market that page well
• Don’t copy pages from other sites and only use that text on your page (be a bit more creative!)
• Make sure your site is secure and use absolute URLs where possible (this cuts down on the chances of being spoofed, your content attacked or copied)
• Control the URLs your content management system/database spits out. Not doing this can create lots of URLs that are not needed
• Don’t use session IDs, use cookies instead
• Make sure your search engine sitemap includes only those URLs that you want indexed (oh, and make sure you submit it too…)

So, as I say there is no penalty in duplicate content, but it can make a mess of your good positions (by diluting the page) and also make Google and the rest confused about how to crawl your site.