Content is about evolution, not revolution

by Nick Wild

We’re currently rewriting the content at Absorbing.com: not because it’s wrong, but because the best can always be improved.

As a digital agency we know how important it is to get the keyword densities correct, the subject matter on target and the back-end code optimised.

However, we also know that it’s important to make the site readable, so we’re paying just as much attention to how it reads to humans as to search engine spiders.

In fact search engines — especially Google — are now very good at looking beyond the “grey hat” techniques that make copy stilted, forced, robotic and, at times, virtually unreadable.

While we want to appear at the top of any search of Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and the rest by potential customers on the look-out for good SEO skills or joined-up SEM and PPC mastery, we also want those visitors to be able to fully appreciate our search services when they arrive.

Absorb is lucky that it has such a wide range of skills in-house, including excellent copyrighting for the web, so look out for the new pages and new posts from Absorb staff as part of our continuing commitment to customers old and new.


Posted: September 30, 2009 @ 10:18 am

Why Google doesn’t penalise duplicate content

by Nick Wild

Google's Greg Gauthaus delivers the good news

CLEARED UP: Google's Greg Gauthaus delivers the good news

A post yesterday on Google Webmaster Central by Greg Grothaus attempts to clear up confusion about duplicate content.

Like most other SEO professionals, I’ve been chanting the mantra that “Duplicate Content is the 8th Deadly Sin” for a long time now. Greg’s post certainly doesn’t give carte blanche to those lowlifes who would copy the dictionary on to a website and call it their own in a bid to monopolise the search results, but it does show that not all duplicated content is a bad thing.

The official Google line is that they DO NOT penalise duplication, they penalise SPAM, and spammers have been known to use duplicate content.

We’re currently working on creating a sitemap for one of our clients as part of the strategy to get their site better indexed by the search engines. With many millions of pages on the site — even after excluding obvious duplicates — there are still a few examples which slip through the net. These are usually the result of different paths to the same content, mainly because customers use the site in individual ways.

What Greg says is that Google thinks this is fine; but, he argues, web masters should strive whereever possible to reduce duplication because …

  • It reduces the inherent authority of “page uniqueness”
  • It means searches can return user-hostile URLs
  • It spreads the “link-juice” of the duplicated pages
  • It means the search engines waste time indexing duplicated pages, and
  • It’s easy to fix with 301 redirects and the Google canonical tag

However, innocent duplication — especially where it is the product of a legitimate function of the website, such as breadcrumb navigation — will NOT be penalised.


Posted: September 16, 2009 @ 1:08 pm
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