If you want to learn basic SEO and have a website that uses a content management system like WordPress or an ecommerce site with URL’s that look like this “http://www.example.com/category/sub-category/product.asp?pid=871&couponcode+21″ chances are you have duplicate content issues and today I’m going to give you the definition of duplicate content and elaborate on why it’s a potential problem for your website rankings.

Duplicate Content Definition

Google’s definition of duplicate content: “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar”.

This means that duplicate content happens when Google finds two or more URL’s that virtually have the same content. When Google finds duplicate content, the algorithm will exclude those duplicate pages from their main index because Google wants to provide the best search results possible.

Why Is Duplicate Content A Problem For Users?

How would you like it if you were on Google and looked up the search term “Libya Rebels Regain Brega Town” and found that practically every search result on the first page had the same exact content? This wouldn’t be very useful for discovering different content would it? I know some users might start to think that Google search results suck and start using a different search engine (possibly a Bing/Facebook type of deal) but that’s highly unlikely. And don’t take this the wrong way, I still think Google has the best search results out there and I can only imagine how difficult it is to run that operation with a bunch of spammers polluting the web with crap, much respect to Google.

Malicious Duplicate Content Definition

Duplicate content can be on the same domain or across multiple domains like in the example above. Google primarily filters websites that copy other peoples web content and then publish it on their own sites. That scraped duplicate content (with a little help from basic SEO) can actually outrank the original content in search results which then drives traffic to spammers sites which generates advertising revenue.

Duplicate content is very difficult for Google to control algorithmically for many reasons that I won’t go into here but a good example would be to think about how crappy mainstream media really is?  In that, no matter how many different news channels you flip through they all basically provide the exact same content that’s coming from AP and Reuters. This is Google’s big dilemma with duplicate content is dealing with the structure of syndication and keeping search engines based on latent semantic indexing useful and relevant for users.

Non-Malicious Duplicate Content Definition:

Duplicate content can be non-malicious in nature but can still affect your sites search engine results if you have let’s say mobile versions of your web pages, printer only versions of your web pages or ecommerce sites that use a multi-tiered hierarchy where the same product pages are found on multiple URLs.

Here’s an example of how crawlers would see the exact same product page on an ecommerce site with duplicate content on multiple URL’s:

www.example.com/category/sub-category/product.asp
www.example.com/sub-category/product.asp
www.example.com/product.asp
www.example.com/category/sub-category/product.asp?pid=871&couponcode+21

Duplicate Content on WordPress

Content management systems such as WordPress and Drupal also produce duplicate content issues by creating an infinite number of (status “200 OK” URL’s) pages that all have the same content on them. So lets say I chose 3 categories for a particular post I just published and named them Cat1, Cat2, Cat3. Using WordPress, you end up with the exact same duplicate content on the following URL’s:

www.example.com/Cat1/mypost
www.example.com/Cat2/mypost
www.example.com/Cat3/mypost
www.example.com/blog/
www.example.com/blog/mypost

Those URL’s were just a few examples of the duplicate content that would be created on WordPress, Drupal, etc.

Duplicate Content and SEO

When you have duplicate content issues Google will usually filter duplicate content and rank only the original document. One problem for SEO’s when you have duplicate content like this is that any links that point to the duplicate pages that get excluded from Google’s search engine results will no longer 100% benefit the original. If you’re not checking for duplicate content you can end up splitting your link connectivity metrics, diluting your content, diluting the overall impact of your internal linking strategy and inevitably hurting your search engine rankings.

Every situation is unique and sometimes you might even benefit from duplicate content. Check out my article on The Benefits Of Duplicate Content

Definitive WordPress Duplicate Content Experiment

Duplicate Content WordPress Example: Copy and paste the sentence below (which is the first sentence from a post on SEOmoz) and do a search on Google for it:

Duplicate content in SEO has been around for quite some time and even if Google has been saying they have been getting smarter and smarter in figuring out the best page to display in the SERPS from a list of duplicate content pages.

Below are SEOmoz rankings in Google for it’s own content: Notice how scraper sites are outranking the original post (which is www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical)

#6 www.seomoz.org/blog/popular/past-90-days (obviously not the original post)
#12 www.seomoz.org/blog?page=3

I hope this little experiment conveyed how Google still has a hard time with duplicate content and determining which site posted the original content first. It also implies that the QDF (quality deserves freshness) algorithm and real-time search results are probably the main culprits for scraper sites outranking the original content at this time.

As Google keeps changing it’s algorithm to fight duplicate content (Google’s recent Farmer update) and you have some of these duplicate content issues read my post on  How To Fix Duplicate Content.

Want to know how to start a movement or what that even means?

So did I and ended up watching this video by Derek Sivers which was basically a leadership lesson on How To Start A Movement. It was so inspiring and rocked so much that I had to share it with you!

I would try to elaborate or spin something but the vid says it all.

Video by Derek Sivers at http://sivers.org/ff

Update: If you enjoyed this post on How To Start A Movement and are looking for more fresh and innovative ideas check out Ted.com.

I use drop down and scrolling menus for SEO and usability purposes on a lot of my sites which is mainly for providing lists of brands, products, cities, states and zip codes. If I were to try and put that much information in the footer of my site it can come across as looking spammy and I would get penalized if not done nicely. Look at the footer drop downs below.

So why not take all that useful information and put it in a drop down or scrolling menu to clean things up a bit? Here’s a video I stumbled across with Matt Cutts discussing this very issue of using scrolling menus for SEO.

We want to hear your feedback, so leave a comment.

There’s been a lot of buzz around the SEO community these days saying that Google search results are sucking, spammers are ruining the quality of search and Google has gone completely insane with not letting us permanently opt out of Suggest, Instant and Personalization. Another recent inconvenience is with Google Places where users are now forced to opt-in to Hotpot in order to leave a local business review. I’ve gotten complaints from the last 2 out of 3 customers who tried to leave a review on Places for one of my businesses (that’s 66% or almost 7 out of 10 users that had a bad experience).

If you’re starting to get a little frustrated with Google, you’re not alone. Bing saw it’s core search volume rise 29% in 2010 compared to 2009 while Google’s search volume increased by less than half that gaining a solid 13%. Is this a signal that Google search results suck?

Latent Semantic Indexing

I was helping a friend of mine with some research and ended up doing a search on Google for this and this. Look at the top URL’s closely, they’re not the official government websites.

It’s easy to criticize Google and that’s not what I’m trying to do here, it’s more for venting than anything malicious. I’ll be the first to admit Google is an amazing company and has probably contributed to the world in the last 15 years what the industrial revolution did to the 18th and 19th century. Google practically created a new economy so give them a break.

Bottom line Google is rolling out some significant changes to their search results and just like with SEO there is a learning process involved for them to make it better. In the meantime, it still leaves SEOs with a lot of obstacles in Google Search Results most notably in tracking search engine rankings.

Check out my list of the top 5 SEO Tools that I’ve tested and use on a daily basis. You’ll find out which tools are accurate and which ones are not and why.

We want to hear your feedback, so leave a comment.

What is Latent Semantic Indexing?

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an indexing and database retrieval method that uses Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Correspondence Analysis to identify patterns in the relationships between terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text. Latent Semantic Indexing then extracts that concept by establishing associations between those terms that occur in similar contexts.

Latent Semantic Indexing has ability to correlate semantically related terms that are latent in a collection of text. The method, also called Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), uncovers the underlying latent semantic structure in the usage of words in a body of text and how it can be used to extract the meaning of the text in response to user queries, commonly referred to as concept searches. Queries, or concept searches, against a set of documents that have undergone Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) will return results that are conceptually similar in meaning to the search criteria even if the results don’t share a specific word or words with the search criteria.

We want to hear your feedback, so leave a comment.

SEO Basics – Choose A Domain Name

When your thinking about learning basic SEO and buying a domain there are many important factors to consider and I will present just a few. One of the most important elements to a domain is it’s age. Google views older domains as reputable and trusted. Trusted sites rank better in Google.

Another important SEO basic is the domain name itself. Try to get a domain name that has some of the keywords you want to be found for like “seo-basics-guide.” Look up on Google “learn SEO basics” you will find this site on page 1. There are other factors to a killer domain which I will cover in the future, so check back soon.

SEO Guide – Meta Tags

One of the elements to learn basic SEO techniques is meta tags. You should optimize your meta tags and URL’s with the keywords and phrases that you want to be found for. Optimize title, description, headers (h1, h2), anchor text, images, files (server side), you can even generate dynamic page titles, pages and site maps. This is just a brief overview, for more SEO Guidelines keep reading.

Learn SEO Basics

In order to learn seo basics you must experiment. Get a domain at Verio like I did. They offer free basic parking and allow you to change HTML meta tags for learning seo basics. Good Luck.

Learning Basic SEO

This is one of my favorite basic SEO strategies. Write concise and descriptive keyword rich content. Somewhere between 350 and 750 words a page. Notice how I’m using the keywords I want to be found for such as “SEO Guide”.

One of the best pieces of basic SEO advice I can give you would be to offer quality content. Try to write something useful or unique content.

We want to hear your feedback, so leave a comment.