This is my first post to my WF Blog, and I hope to make regular appearances here. My blog will mostly be about testing new IM ideas and theories I hear others put out.
I am self-employed as an offline consultant, and have built a nice practice. My results-oriented style has helped win and keep clients. I no longer have to be the cheapest guy in my area.
Feel free to leave comments about my ramblings as you choose.
I am self-employed as an offline consultant, and have built a nice practice. My results-oriented style has helped win and keep clients. I no longer have to be the cheapest guy in my area.
Feel free to leave comments about my ramblings as you choose.
Duplicate Content - What is The REAL Deal?
Posted 01-28-2010 at 08:18 PM by Marcus Paul
Duplicate content has been my biggest concern since I got into IM. I consider myself to be somewhat educated in the arts of IM, yet even I would get concerned about the effects of duplicate content and Google. So I can imagine how a newbie must feel.
First, let's define duplicate content. Basically, there are two types:
1 - Identical content that appears twice on the same website.
2 - Identical content that appears on multiple websites.
Number one is easily solved by adding the "rel=canonical" tag to the sitemap URLs containing the original post. Googlebot knows to ignore the other duplicate piece on your website.
Number two is the tricky one. Remember, online news sites and magazines run duplicate content all day, every day. They also have some unique content, but for the most part there is duplicate content with other sites. So how does Google treat them? Well, if 100 online sites all run the same Associated Press story, who shows up first? Not the Associated Press (LimaOhio.com). Any of the news sites will show up first. So how does Google decide. I don't claim to know for sure, but I would guess that LINKS determine that.
To get to the bottom of it, I decided to run some tests. I ran a few blogs, all of them pulling duplicate content from ArticlesBase. I did link-building through Angela's and Paul's backlinks, as well as some blog comments. I picked a single post from each blog and linked to it. The remaining posts received internal links. What happened? The posts that had external links to them were able to rank ahead of the original article on ArticlesBase using my keyword. Sometimes it took more links and that was based on niche and keywords. The articles with internal links did not rank ahead even half of the time, but they were indexed and appeared in results for the article title. Good enough for my tests.
So Autobloggers rejoice. If link-building is in your game plan, you have nothing to fear from duplicate content.
Just make sure you do your keyword research properly or it won't matter anyway.
First, let's define duplicate content. Basically, there are two types:
1 - Identical content that appears twice on the same website.
2 - Identical content that appears on multiple websites.
Number one is easily solved by adding the "rel=canonical" tag to the sitemap URLs containing the original post. Googlebot knows to ignore the other duplicate piece on your website.
Number two is the tricky one. Remember, online news sites and magazines run duplicate content all day, every day. They also have some unique content, but for the most part there is duplicate content with other sites. So how does Google treat them? Well, if 100 online sites all run the same Associated Press story, who shows up first? Not the Associated Press (LimaOhio.com). Any of the news sites will show up first. So how does Google decide. I don't claim to know for sure, but I would guess that LINKS determine that.
To get to the bottom of it, I decided to run some tests. I ran a few blogs, all of them pulling duplicate content from ArticlesBase. I did link-building through Angela's and Paul's backlinks, as well as some blog comments. I picked a single post from each blog and linked to it. The remaining posts received internal links. What happened? The posts that had external links to them were able to rank ahead of the original article on ArticlesBase using my keyword. Sometimes it took more links and that was based on niche and keywords. The articles with internal links did not rank ahead even half of the time, but they were indexed and appeared in results for the article title. Good enough for my tests.
So Autobloggers rejoice. If link-building is in your game plan, you have nothing to fear from duplicate content.
Just make sure you do your keyword research properly or it won't matter anyway.
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