SEO Tips For Internet Marketers

Posted by admin on September, 14th 2011

One of the first rules you learn when you start doing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is that search engines hate duplicate content. Firstly, duplicate content doesn’t add value to web users as several websites popping up with the same content is irritating for users who are trying to do research. Secondly, search engines then have to decide which website posted the content first, which has the most authority etc and then decide which reigns supreme over the others.

This is why Google implemented their Panda update – to encourage people to stop posting copied or similar (spun) content across the web which added no value.

The Panda update affected mostly article websites, but if you post a lot of content on your website, you may want to check that you aren’t harboring duplicate content. One trick to check for duplicate content is to compare the number of pages of your website that Google has indexed to the number of pages you crawl on the site itself.

To do this, you can use the “site:domain.com” function of Google to see how many pages Google has indexed. The program Xenu for Windows (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) and Integrity for Mac (http://peacockmedia.co.uk/integrity/) are free programs which crawl an entire site and essentially create a sitemap, telling you how many pages are indexed and the page structure of the website.

If Google has ignored many of your pages then it is likely that there is a duplicate content issue. This might become obvious when looking at the the list of crawled pages that you have generated on Xenu or Integrity or you may have to use a service such as Copyscape to check for duplicate content on a page of your website: http://copyscape.com/

If a lot of your pages are missing, what happens next?

If parameters/session id issues are not to blame for the pages Google hasn’t include in it’s index then the issue may lie with copied or shallow content.

Technical issues that may be holding back the number of indexed pages in Google could be problems such as the robots.txt file, mis-used iframes or canocial tag issues. If this is the case then your SEO company needs to liaise with your web developer to rectify this as soon as possible as the negative impact upon SEO can be catastrophic. Check out our blog post of canonical tags to find out more.

Hopefully, once all pages on your site are unique enough to make it into Google’s index, you can concentrate on other aspect of SEO which will help you on your way to conquering your SEO goals.

To find out how SEO can help your business, contact David Wiltshire on 0845 544 1765.

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Labels: check, Content, duplicate