Building Mailing Lists, List Building, Social Media, Niche Marketing

In this video, Matt Cutts answers someone’s question on effective ways to generate organic link building

The origional question asked was: “can you please list 5 effective ways of organic link building other than building great content?”

Here’s Matt’s response:

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Google Doesn’t Care if You USED to Get Links

You may have gotten some good links in the past, but don’t count on them helping you forever. Old links go stale in the eyes of Google.

Do you still get links to old content? Tell us why you think that is.

Google’s Matt Cutts responded to a user-submitted question asking if Google removes PageRank coming from links on pages that no longer exist (for example, GeoCities pages that have been shut down). The answer to this question is unsurprisingly yes, but Cutts makes a statement within his response that may not be so obvious to everybody.

“In order to prevent things from becoming stale, we tend to use the current link graph, rather than a link graph of all of time,” he says. (Emphasis added)

Now, this isn’t exactly news, and to the seasoned search professional, probably not much of a revelation. However, to the average business owner looking to improve search engine performance (and not necessarily adapting to theever-changing ways of SEO), it could be something that really hasn’t resonated. Businesses have always been told about the power of links, but even if you got a lot of significant links a year or two ago, that doesn’t mean your content will continue to perform well based on that.  WebProNews has discussed the value of “link velocity” and Google’s need for freshness in the past:

Link velocity refers to the speed at which new links to a webpage are formed, and by this term we may gain some new and vital insight. Historically, great bursts of new links to a specific page has been considered a red flag, the quickest way to identify a spammer trying to manipulate the results by creating the appearance of user trust. This led to Google’s famous assaults on link farms and paid link directories.

But the Web has changed, become more of a live Web than a static document Web. We have the advent of social bookmarking, embedded videos, links, buttons, and badges, social networks, real-time networks like Twitter and Friendfeed. Certainly the age of a website is still an indication of success and trustworthiness, but in an environment of live, real time updating, the age of a link as well as the slowing velocity of incoming links may be indicators of stale content in a world that values freshness.

Do you think link freshness should play a role in search engine rankings? Let Chris and WebProNews know.

So how do you keep getting “fresh” links?

If you want fresh links, there are a number of things you can do. For one, keep putting out content. Write content that has staying power. You can link to your old content when appropriate. Always promote the sharing of your content. Include buttons to make it easy for people to share your content on their social network of choice. You may want to make sure your old content is presented in the same template as your new content so it has the same sharing features. People still may find their way to that old content, and they may want to share it if encouraged.

Go back over old content, and look for stuff that is still relevant. You can update stories with new posts adding a fresher take, linking to the original. Encourage readers to follow the link and read the original article, which they may then link to themselves.

Leave commenting on for ongoing discussion. This can keep an old post relevant. Just because you wrote an article a year ago, does not mean that people will still not add to it, and sometimes people will link to articles based on comments that are left.

Share old posts through social networks if they are still about relevant topics. You don’t want to just start flooding your Twitter account with tweets to all of your old content, but if you have an older article that is relevant to a current discussion, you may share it, as your take on the subject. A follower who has not seen it before, or perhaps has forgotten about it, may find it worth linking to themselves. Can you think of other ways to get more link value out of old content?

Do you get fresh links for old content? Why do you think that is? Share your thoughts with WebProNews.

Related Articles:

> Google’s Treatment of Twitter and Facebook Links
> How Press Releases Can Be Great For Search
> Link Building for Bing Rankings: Dos and Don’ts

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237

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RDFa Could Play an Increasingly Big Role in Search

RDFa, which stands for Resource Description Framework in attributes, is a W3C recommendation, which adds a set of attribute level extensions to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within web documents. While not everyone believes that W3C standards are incredibly necessary to operate a successful site, some see a great deal of potential for search engine optimization in RDFa.

In fact, this is the topic of a current WebProWorld thread, which was started by Dave Lauretti of MoreStar, who asks, “Are you working the RDFa Framework into your SEO campaigns?” He writes, “Now under certain conditions and with certain search strings on both Google and Yahoo we can find instances where the RDFa framework integrated within a website can enhance their listing in the search results.”

Lauretti refers to an article from last summer at A List Apart, by Mark Birbeck who said that Google was beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes sites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with “rich snippets”. This results in the Google results you see like this:

“It’s a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable — if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through,” Google said upon the launch of rich snippets.

Google says it is experimenting with markup for business and location data, but that it doesn’t currently display this information, unless the business or organization is part of a review (hence the results in the above example). But when review information is marked up in the body of a web page, Google can identify it and may make it available in search results. When review information is shown in search results, this can of course entice users to click through to the page (one of the many reasons to treat customers right and monitor your reputation).

Currently Google uses RDFa for reviews, but this search also displays the date of the review, the star rating, the author and the price range of an iPod, as Lauretti points out.

Best Buy’s lead web development engineer reported that by adding RDFa the company saw improved ranking for respective pages. They saw a 30% increase in traffic, and Yahoo evidently observed a 15% increase in click-through rates.(via Steven Pemberton)

Implications for SEO

I’m not going to get into the technical side of RDFa here (see resources listed later in the article), but I would like to get into some of the implications that Google’s use of RDFa could have on SEO practices. For one, rich snippets can show specific information related to products that are searched for. For example, a result for a movie search could bring up information like:

- Run time
- Release Date
- Rating
- Theaters that are showing it

“The implementation of RDFa not only gives more information about products or services but also increases the visibility of these in the latest generations of search engines, recommender systems and other applications,” Lauretti tells WebProNews. “If accuracy is an issue when it comes to search and search results then pages with RDFa will get better rankings as there would be little to question regarding the page theme.” (Source) He provides the following chart containing examples of the types of data that could potentially be displayed with RDFa:

“It is obvious that search marketers and SEOs will be utilizing this ability for themselves and their clients,” says Lauretti. Take contact information specifically. “Using RDFa in your contact information clarifies to the search engine that the text within your contact block of code is indeed contact information.” He says in this same light, “people information” can be displayed in the search results (usually social networking info). You could potentially show manufacturer information or author information.

RDFa actually has implications beyond just Google’s regular web search.
With respect to Google’s Image search, the owner of images can also use RDFa to provide license information about the images they own. Google currently allows image searchers to have images displayed based on license type, and using RDFa with your images lets the search bots know under which licenses you are making your images available (Via Mark Birbeck). There is also RDFa support for video.

Following are some resources where you can learn more about RDFa and how to implement it:

Google Introduces Rich Snippets
Introduction to RDFa
RDFa Primer
About RDFa (Google Webmaster Central)
RDFa to Provide Image License Info
RDFa Microformat Tagging For Your Website
For Businesses and Organizations
About Review Data (Google Webmaster Central)

Google’s Matt Cutts has said in the past that Google has been kind of “white listing” sites to get rich snippets, as Google feels they are appropriate, but as they grow more confident that such snippets don’t hurt the user experience, then Google will likely roll the ability out more and more broadly. This is one thing to keep an eye on as the year progresses, and is why those in the WebProWorld thread believe RDFa will become a bigger topic of discussion in 2010.

WebProNews would like to thank Dave Lauretti, who contributed some findings to this piece.

Update: As I pieced together this article, Google coincidentally announced support for rich snippets for Events.

Related Articles:

> Get Your Breadcrumbs in Google for More Links in Results
> Google Makes it Easier to Tell Where Results Originate From
> Get More Links in Your Actual Google Results

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237

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Matt Cutts talk about Google’s treatment of links from Facebook and Twitter.

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Google Talks About Getting Your Breadcrumbs In

Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your breadcrumbs into Google’s results, you essentially have more links on the results page. You have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail.

Do your site’s breadcrumbs show up in Google’s results? Leave a comment at WebProNews.

The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don’t give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do. Interestingly, there seems to be an incentive for those who go the breadcrumb route because of the multiple links that you just don’t get with regular search results.

Google’s move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, “It’s definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of ‘providing context’, because the web is heading into its “semantic” period … where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links.”

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, “Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???” Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the “early days” for breadcrumbs.

“Think about the situation with sitelinks,” he says. “Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before…for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn’t like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we’ve changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you’re familiar with). So we’ve iterated over time.”

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. “Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time,” he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn’t exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the “>” used. That includes examples from Google’s original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs (if you see other ways, please point them out in the comments). Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I’d go with that.

There are three types of breadcrumbs (as described here): path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page, while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page. Obviously, location breadcrumbs would be the ones Google is using (although with personalized search becoming more of a factor, who knows in the future?).

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237

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Here is an interesting article written by Titus Hoskins that I personally have seen some of the effects of. If you do ANY internet marketing at all, I feel that this is a MUST READ ……..

Next year may just prove to be one of the most challenging times for pursuing online or Internet marketing on the web. It may just be a watershed moment for many marketers struggling to keep abreast of all the different factors which have come into play in recent months. Most of these changes will stem from two main sources for potential upheaval: the first being the New FTC (Federal Trade Commission) Guidelines regarding Testimonials and Endorsements and the second being “ALL” the recent changes within Google.

Actually, we already have the new FTC Guidelines which came into effect on Dec. 1st of 2009, but how these new rules are enforced will play out in the coming year as test-cases are brought to court. Basically, these new rules call for absolute disclosure and full transparency regarding Testimonials and Endorsements when a product or service is being offered for sale. Any business (monetary) relationship between the endorser and the company must be made known to the potential buyer. Obviously for those in online or affiliate marketing this could have a great impact if these new rules are strictly enforced. Just imagine all the website owners and bloggers who slap a few banners or affiliate links on their sites to cover hosting or operating costs… will they now have to disclose all these business arrangements?

For professional affiliate marketers and the companies/products they’re promoting, these new guidelines could cause potential headaches and/or legal ramifications since a general blanket disclaimer on their sites will no longer be suffice. To help solve this problem, many of the major companies are now placing an “affiliate” tag on all their banners and making it obvious a business relationship exists with its affiliates. In addition, many online marketers are placing additional disclaimers, affiliate seals and in other ways making it known certain links are indeed affiliate links and a relationship does exist with the product and/or services being promoted.

With these new guidelines, another big issue is email marketing, one of the major marketing techniques of most online marketers. Will a full disclosure be necessary for every email sales pitch? Savvy web marketers know the key to increased sales is in the “follow-up” and the “cookie-ing” of potential buyers; how will the new Guidelines affect this very effective marketing practice? How all these new rules or guidelines play out will make next year a very interesting one for marketing on the web.

Despite this, perhaps the greatest cause for upheaval in the coming year will be Google. There are countless reasons why Google will be a major game changer in 2010 for online marketing. Ever since Bing and more recently the potential Bing/Yahoo competition, Google has gone into complete overdrive, implementing new changes and debuting new programs like there was no tomorrow.

First, we have Google Caffeine which Google is introducing (full force) early in the new year. Google Caffeine, which is a major overhaul of its search engine, will no doubt cause many a marketer some sleepless nights as the total fall-out becomes evident. Other Google updates in the past (Florida Update comes readily to mind) have wreaked havoc on many top ranking sites, but this time Google is doing things a little differently and have even given webmasters a beta version of the new search engine. Still, rightly or wrongly, many online marketers are bracing themselves for the full impact of Caffeine. Will it mean smooth sailing or a stomach sickening roller-coaster ride for marketers and webmasters?

Second, we have the introduction of “Real Time” search which will be featured in Google’s SERPs. This will make the social media sites like Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace… much more important. Again, the implications for online marketers could be enormous since many can now reach the first page through a different route. Will it also mean more “Real Time” spam? But more importantly, will it mean a greater marketing opportunity for the online marketer who exploits it?

Third, we are seeing Google moving more and more towards “Visual Search” with the introduction of Google Goggles for mobile phones. Just take a picture and you get the Google results instantly – no typing, just point and click. Just envision countless clueless teenagers or more importantly helpless shoppers suddenly being empowered with knowledge and wisdom. Could do more for education since the invention of the printed word and the info-commercial combined. Talk about scary! But will the implications for web marketing be just as revolutionary and enlightening?

Fourth, Google has made it known through its spokesperson Matt Cutts, that site-loading times will be a ranking factor in the new improved Google. Also, proper and correct page coding will also be more important if you want your site to be at full advantage. Broken links will be a big “No-No”, while linking out to important related sites a big plus. All this is only logical, Google’s main product is and has always been its search results, anything which improves those results and provides a more pleasing experience for the Google user should be front and center. Obviously, one way for Google to stay on top, is to provide the best search results to its users.

Fifth, in order to please the end-user, Google is also moving more towards “Personalized Search” which will make SEO and ranking in the top spot for your chosen keywords a total nightmare for many professional SEOs and online marketers. If everyone can choose their own top results, isn’t SEO more or less, a lame duck? Again, the ramifications of personalized search will further play out in 2010, but will professional marketers like what they see?

Finally, while no one would argue Google is King of the Hill when it comes to online search, will all these new changes strengthen or weaken Google’s grip? Will the combined Bing/Yahoo be able to give this giant some much needed competition? Or will Google’s main competition come from an unlikely source, such as big name multi-national corporations who are moving their operations online. Can these big-name keyworded domains start directly pulling in the majority of the web’s traffic, making all search engines secondary? As people become more web savvy, will they go directly to what they’re looking for on the web, bypassing the search engines altogether – including the mighty Google? Such a scenario could have greater consequences for the affiliate marketer since a direct line to a company’s site or product will obviously mean less sales for the online marketer, who really works in coordination with the search engines, either through organic search or PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising in these same search engines.

Overall, the new FTC Guidelines and recent changes to Google, will make next year one of the most interesting times to be pitching anything online. Throw into this the full effect that a combined Bing/Yahoo might bring to the table, and you have the recipe for a tumultuous white knuckle ride, until the dust finally settles and marketers make adjustments like they always do. Until then, hold on because things will probably get a little hectic for many web marketers before we see the light at the end of the tunnel.

About The Author
Titus Hoskins is a full time online affiliate marketer. His livelihood is derived from & dependent upon search engine marketing & daily monitoring of targeted keywords, mainly within Google. He runs numerous sites, including: Free Marketing Tools & Internet Marketing Tools
Titus Hoskins Copyright 2009. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

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Google To Begin Rolling Out Caffeine Update After Holidays

Update: Out at PubCon in Las Vegas, Mike McDonald of WebProNews discussed the rolling out of the Caffeine update further with popular search enthusiast Barry Schwartz:

Original Article (by Chris Crum)
It appears that the effects of Google’s Caffeine update may be felt sooner rather than later. That is if you really do feel the effects at all.

If you are unfamiliar with Caffeine, it is an algorithm update that Google announced in the summer. Upon the announcement, Google’s Matt Cutts said, “The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure.” Cutts told WebProNews about Caffeine in the following interview:

When Caffeine was introduced, so was a sandbox, where people could play around with Caffeine based search results, and get a look at how rankings were altered (if at all), and try to get a feel for how it was going to go. Now that sandbox has closed up shop, it looks like the Caffeine update will be live in Google search before too long. It will start after the holidays at least though.

“I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays,” says Cutts on his blog. “Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.”

The announcement at what used to be the Caffeine sandbox reads:

Of course as people tested Caffeine via the sandbox, many of them blogged about their results and findings. The general consensus seemed to be that Caffeine is fast and utilizes real-time search a great deal. Given Google’s frequent announcements related to speed, and a recently announced deal with Twitter, speed and real-time search seem like logical updates to Google search results.

When SEOBook’s Aaron Wall tested Caffeine, he said he thought there was:

- an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority and sorta spammy on page text

- perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names

- perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms

- tuning down some of the exposure for video & some universal search results

This stuff should not necessarily be taken as gospel. These are just the results and speculations of individuals from tests of a product that was only introduced (for testing purposes), let alone finalized. It is what it is.

As the Caffeine update rolls out, there will no doubt be more and more mystery unraveled as search industry professionals scramble to stay ahead of the game, and Google drops subtle hints from time to time. It’s going to be interesting to see where Caffeine takes the world’s most popular search engine.

Have you tested Caffeine? What do you think about the update? Share your findings with SiteProNews.

About the Author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Twitter: @CCrum237

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Google announced yesterday that it has been working on a project called “Caffeine” that will re-write the architecture for Google’s Web search. As Matt Cutts shares exclusively with WebProNews, Caffeine is comparable to the “Big Daddy Update” back in 2005, which consisted of changes to the way Google crawls and indexes websites.

How much of an impact will Caffeine have on results? Matt says there will, hopefully, not be a big difference. Google will integrate Caffeine slowly and take user feedback into consideration.

Matt says, “If we push forward as fast as we can, double down on innovation and try to do the best that we can, [and] do the right thing for users, everything else will work out.”

This infrastructure modification will lay the foundation for future indexing changes and will also allow for the expansion of website speed and size. Incidentally, it could even provide a stronger architecture for potential real-time and semantic efforts.

If you would like to try Caffeine, you can check it out at: http://www2.sandbox.google.com.

Stay tuned to WebProNews as we continue to bring you exclusive coverage from SES San Jose 2009.

About This Article:
This article was provided via WPN Videos – Balancing Blogs And Twitter on August 11th, 2009

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What is a canonical page? Why specify a canonical page?
A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.

 
It’s common for a site to have several pages listing the same set of products. For example, one page might display products sorted in alphabetical order, while other pages display the same products listed by price or by rating. For example:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234567&sort=alpha&sessionid=5678asfasdfasfd

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234567&sort=price&sessionid=5678asfasdfasfd

If Google knows that these pages have the same content, we may index only one version for our search results. Our algorithms select the page we think best answers the user’s query. Now, however, users can specify a canonical page to search engines by adding a <link> element with the attribute rel=”canonical” to the <head> section of the non-canonical version of the page. Adding this link and attribute lets site owners identify sets of identical content and suggest to Google: “Of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results.”

How do I specify a canonical page?
To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish, create a <link> element as follows:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>

 
Copy this link into the <head> section of all non-canonical versions of the page, such as http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=price.
If you publish content on both http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish and https://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish, you can specify the canonical version of the page. Create the <link> element:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>

Add this link to the <head> section of https://www.example.comproduct.php?item=swedish-fish.

Is rel=”canonical” a suggestion or a directive?
This new option lets site owners suggest the version of a page that Google should treat as canonical. Google will take this into account, in conjunction with other signals, when determining which URL sets contain identical content, and calculating the most relevant of these pages to display in search results.

Can the link be relative or absolute?
The rel=”canonical” attribute can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.

Must the content on a set of pages be similar to the content on the canonical version?
Yes. The rel=”canonical” attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).

For instance, if a site has a set of pages for the same model of dance shoe, each varying only by the color of the shoe pictured, it may make sense to set the page highlighting the most popular color as the canonical version so that Google may be more likely to show that page in search results. However, rel=”canonical” would not be appropriate if that same site simply wanted a gel insole page to rank higher than the shoe page.

What happens if rel=”canonical” points to a non-existent page? Or if more than one page in a set is specified as the canonical version?
We’ll do our best to algorithmically determine an appropriate canonical page, just as we’ve done in the past.

Can Google follow a chain of rel=”canonical” designations?
Yes, to some extent, but to ensure optimal canonicalization, we strongly recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page.

Can rel=”canonical” be used to suggest a canonical url on a completely different domain?
No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can specify a canonical page on www.example.com from a set of pages on example.com or help.example.com, but not on example-widgets.com.

About This Article:
This article is from Google Webmaster Tools / site management – “About rel=”canonical” – Webmasters/Site owners Help” – Explained by Matt Cutts

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Being a full-time online marketer means you have to keep a close watch on how Google is ranking pages on the web… one very serious concern is the whole issue of duplicate content. More importantly, how does having duplicate content on your site and on other people’s sites, affect your keyword rankings in Google and the other search engines?

Now, recently it seems that Google is much more open about just how it ranks content. I say “seems” because with Google there are years and years of mistrust when it comes to how they treat content and webmasters. Google’s whole “do as I say” attitude leaves a bitter taste in most webmasters’ mouths. So much so, that many have had more than enough of Google’s attitude and ignore what Google and their pundits say altogether.

This is probably very emotionally fulfilling, but is it the right route or attitude to take? Probably not!

Mainly because, regardless of whether you love or hate Google, there’s no denying they are King of online search and you must play by their rules or leave a lot of serious online revenue on the table. Now, for my major keyword content/pages even a loss of just a few places in the rankings can mean I lose hundreds of dollars in daily commissions, so anything affecting my rankings obviously gets my immediate attention.

So the whole tricky issue of duplicate content has caused me some concern and I have made an ongoing mental note to myself to find out everything I can about it. I am mainly worried about my content being ranked lower because the search engines think it is duplicate content and penalizes it.

My situation is compounded by the fact that I am heavily into article marketing – the same articles are featured on hundreds, some times thousands of sites across the web. Naturally, I am worried these articles will dilute or lower my rankings rather than accomplish their intended purpose of getting higher rankings.

I try to vary the anchor text/keyword link in the resource boxes of these articles. I don’t use the same keyword phrase over and over again, as I am nearly 99% positive Google has a “keyword use” quota – repeat the same keyword phrase too often and your highly linked content will be lowered around 50 or 60 places, basically taking it out of the search results. Been there, done that!

I even like submitting unique articles to certain popular sites so only that site has the article, thus eliminating the whole duplicate content issue. This also makes for a great SEO strategy, especially for beginning online marketers, your site will take some time to get to a PR6 or PR7, but you can place your content and links on high PR7 or PR8 authority sites immediately. This will bring in quality traffic and help your own site get established.

Another way I combat this issue is by using a 301 re-direct so that traffic and pagerank flows to the URL I want ranked. You can also use your Google Webmaster Tool account to show which version of your site you want ranked or featured: with or without the www.

The whole reason for doing any of this has to do with PageRank juice – you want to pass along this ranking juice to the appropriate page or content. This can raise your rankings, especially in Google.

Thankfully, there is the relatively new “canonical tag” you can use to tell the search engines this is the page/content you want featured or ranked. Just add this meta link tag to your content which you want ranked or featured, as in the example given below:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”place your preferred link here”>

Anyway, this whole duplicate issue has many faces and sides, so I like going directly to Google for my information. Experience has shown me that Google doesn’t always give you the full monty, but for the most part, you can follow what they say. Lately, over the last year or so, Google seems to have made a major policy change and are telling webmasters a lot more information on how they (Google) rank their index.

So if you’re concerned or interested in finding out more about duplicate content and what Google says about it try these helpful links. First one is a very informative video on the subject entitled “Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues” which is presented by Greg Grothaus who works for Google.

Another great link is this page from Google Webmasters Support Answers by Matt Cutts. It has a lot of helpful information, including a video on the Canonical Link Element.

In yet another post, Matt Cutts discusses the related issue of content scraping and advises webmasters not to worry about it. This is a slightly different matter, other webmasters and unmentionables may use software to scrape your site and place your content on their site. This has happened to me, countless times, including when my content has been reduced to scrambled nonsense. Cutts says not to worry about this matter as Google can usually tell the original source of the material. In fact, having links in this duplicate content may just help your rankings in Google.

“There are some people who really hate scrapers and try to crack down on them and try to get every single one deleted or kicked off their web host,” says Cutts. “I tend to be the sort of person who doesn’t really worry about it, because the vast, vast, vast majority of the time, it’s going to be you that comes up, not the scraper. If the guy is scraping and scrapes the content that has a link to you, he’s linking to you, so worst case, it won’t hurt, but in some weird cases, it might actually help a little bit.”

As a full time online marketer I am not so easily convinced, I mainly have pressing concerns about my unscrupulous competition using these scrapings and duplicate content to undermine one’s rankings in Google by triggering some keyword spam filter. Whether in fact this actually happens, only Google knows for sure, but it is just another indication, despite the very detailed and helpful information given above, duplicate content and the issues surrounding it, will still present serious concerns for online marketers and webmasters in the future.

About The Author
By Titus Hoskins 2009
The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools. If you liked the article above, why not try this Free 7 Day Marketing Course here: Marketing Tools Copyright 2009 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

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