This series is pulled from a presentation given at SMX East. Part I of this series covered the problems duplicate content creates. Part II covered some of the causes of duplicate content. This post covers some of the solutions that will help you fix your duplicate content problems.
This series is pulled from a presentation given at SMX East. Part I of this serious covered the problems duplicate content creates. This post covers the causes of duplicate content, and Part III will look at the solutions you need to implement to fix your duplicate content problems.
Duplicate content is like a virus. When a virus enters your system, it begins to replicate itself until it is ready to be released and cause all kinds of nasty havoc within your body. On the web, a little duplicate content isn’t a huge problem, but the more it replicates itself, the bigger the problem you’re going to have. Too much duplicate content and your website will come down with some serious health issues.
Yeah, yeah, the search engines are getting smarter about duplicate content… blah, blah, blah. It’s no longer the problem it once was… yada, yada, yada. Google will get it all sorted out for you.
Whatevs.
I don’t care how smart the search engines are, it’s no excuse for laziness. Sure, a maid may clean up your living room for you, but that’s no excuse to ask them to wipe your…, er, mouth, too.
My last three posts covered a variety of questions regarding keyword usage, links and website architecture. In this post I’ll address the final question that has to do with the visual display of your pages, duplicate content and CSS.
Years ago dynamic websites posed significant problems for search engines. While the engines have come a long way since the early days of dynamic website development, there are still some key problems that arise. Google has gone public stating that you don’t need to fix your dynamic site problems, but in reality that’s poor advice for the website owner.
Google says this in their own self interests so they can use your problems to fix theirs. But when engaging in the battle of online visibility, you don’t want to sit around while Google figures out how to plug the holes with their indexing spiders. You need to be proactive and fix the issues so you can be competitive today, not tomorrow.
There is a big difference between optimizing your site for keywords and making it search engine friendly. While one of the first steps in the optimization process should be focused on ensuring the site is search engine friendly, sometimes we tend to want to jump right into the keyword optimization because that’s how we “see results” in the search engines.
Even though an SEO may do all they can to make a site search engine friendly early in the optimization process, some issues will only be uncovered over time as the engines begin spidering and indexing the website. By keeping an eye on performance we can often find indicators that something may be wrong. With that hypothesis, the SEO must delve into research mode to uncover what, if anything, is creating problems for the site.
There are a number of individual issues that you can keep an eye on. Some issues can easily be fixed at the beginning of the SEO process, others are fixed as pages and keywords get optimized, and still others can only be uncovered later as time passes. Each, however are important to ensure your site remains as search engine friendly as possible.
Here is another round of questions submitted to me during a Website Architecture webinar I gave a couple months back. I wasn’t able to answer most of these questions before or during the presentation so I’ve been answering them in this Q&A series. You can check out Parts one, two, three, four, five , six and seven. This post covers questions regarding session IDs, repetitive vs. duplicate content, robots.txt files, navigation text, and maintaining link juice after a site re-design. Let’s get to it.
(Don't wait for the movie!)
E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing & Marketing Your Website Online
