Posted May 30th, 2008
by admin
While professional bloggers and webmasters know a great deal when it comes to the value of duplicate content, we are still seeing a number of websites whereby they promote “my other” blog or “my other” site that shows exactly the same content as the other site. The only difference is the domain name. Our conclusion is that they may be newbies and simply unaware of the effects of their actions. So we come up with this article.
What is duplicate content?
Simply it is text content that is shown elsewhere in the internet- either in your other web pages or other people’s web pages. It is a copy of the same article found in another page in the internet.
More exposure of same content=More Traffic?
When we maintain multiple websites, there is the tendency to cross-promote published articles from within these websites- thinking it would promote the articles more and get added exposure. For most, a simple cut and paste of the entire article does the trick. It stems from the idea that “the more places I put it out there, the more people would see it, so my traffic will increase!” That line of thinking comparably, is like reproducing a book for distribution so more people could get to it.
Unfortunately, that only works in actual products or services for distribution offline. What we do online with our published articles has consequential effects in terms of search engine optimization and rankings. For the unaware, the simple syndication of our articles in feeds and aggregators already qualifies as duplicate content. Same goes as say, maintaining a blog in Blogspot and allowing your Multiply or Facebook account to show the same articles in the respective accounts.
Duplicate content matters to Search engines
Although there is no direct duplicate content penalty, you are making it hard for search engines to rank your individual web pages when it is also available from another source, either the same or nearly the same content. They may be considered duplicate even if they are not fully identical. In this case, search engines will only list or show one version of the content in their search results and you better hope it is your website appearing on the search and not some other sites that syndicated your article without a permanent link back to your original article!
When search engines find duplicate contents, their search algorithm will determine which one is the better article to show in the results. That is only understandable as you don’t want to be typing a keyword and finding four articles with the same exact content found on different web pages. Google and others will filter those articles out and pick the best to show in the result. They would base it on the number and quality of the inbound links connected to the content.
How to avoid Duplicate content
- If you must show the same article in your other web pages, choose which one you want Google and others to show in search results. Remember that search engines also see the printer version, mobile version when available on your site on top of your regular content version. Hide the others. How? By Adding a noindex meta tag to your duplicate contents. We showed you how in this previous article:
REP META tag: How Google and Other Search Engines Find Your Website
- Require back links from other sources. If you syndicate your articles, make sure the articles point back to your website so search engines know where the content came from. They may like the other content from another site not your own, then your article will not show up in search at all.
Some tips and more explanation on duplicate content from Google may be found on the Webmaster Help center.
What about snippets or quotations?
It’s all right to get a summary or some quotations and lines from your own original article to place it on another site of your own. We stress original article as copying someone else’s article and claiming it your own is a whole different issue- and a serious one at that. That is called plagiarism and original articles are in fact copyrighted and is protected by law. You can not just copy another else’s work. When you do, that is also a duplicate content and it will show.
Copyscape.com can detect duplicate content!
Make your own original unique content for your websites and avoid getting penalized by Google or by copyright laws.
Here is a tool checker we found to detect duplicate contents from two websites. They give our results in percentage and basically, the lower the percentage- the lower your chances of being penalized by search engines for duplicate content. When checking, you would want a lower percentage result and not higher.
Note: This tool when used will open another browser leading to the host’s website where it can yield the result and interpret it.
Posted May 26th, 2008
by admin
According to the latest Nielsen online report released in May 19, 2008, Google is the top search provider in the United States garnering a whooping 62% share of all search queries made in April 2008. Yahoo! Search came in second with a mere 17.5% while MSN/Windows Live Search has a lousy 9.7% .
To represent the huge difference in numbers, it means that Google easily handled roughly 5.1 billion searches in the United States in April alone while Yahoo! Search had only about 1.4 billion and MSN Search, about 796 million.
Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, delivers comprehensive, independent measurement and analysis of online audiences, advertising, video, consumer-generated media, word of mouth, commerce and consumer behavior. The Nielsen Company is the leading internet media and market research company in the world.
Posted May 20th, 2008
by admin
Undeniably, Google Adsense is the most popular source for monetizing websites and is the most widely used. If you are a blogger or a publisher for any online business, you most likely have Google Adsense in your websites. Therefore, you must have seen/learned about the updated Terms of Service (TOS) of Google Adsense when you logged into your Google Adsense accounts recently. Upon logging in, you were asked to accept the given terms or not. If you accepted, have you actually read the entire TOS to know what you must or must not do?
Privacy Policy
In standard Terms and Conditions, either we read or not- we need not have to do anything and as long as we’re doing everything in the most proper and legal way, we won’t run into trouble.
However, reading closely the new TOS of Google Adsense, we are in fact required to do something- that is transparency. All web publishers must create a Privacy Policy section on their websites if using Google Adsense. Specifically, we need to tell our readers that third parties like Google Adsense maybe putting cookies or web beacons on their computers without their knowledge while browsing our website.
Part of the Google Terms and Conditions read:
You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that complies with applicable privacy and data protection laws and that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.
Where to Get Privacy Policy Sample
Good guys of Google didn’t even think that regular bloggers may not be well equipped with technical and legal jargons to formulate its own Privacy Policy. How and where to even begin?! They required it, they should have at least provided everybody with a standard policy in which to copy or become the basis for creating one.
Everyone has until May 25th to accept the TOS and or put up their own Privacy Policy. Not accepting the Terms would mean being banned from using Google Adsense forever!
If you notice, we now have a Privacy Policy page on our blog. Nope, we weren’t creative enough to come up with one but we found a WordPress plugin (Big thank you Eric Giguere!) that did everything for us.
Installation is simple, as with most WordPress plugins. Download the privacy-policy-1.0.zip file and extract its contents into your blog’s wp-content/plugin. Extract and you should be able to find a Privacy Policy folder. Go to your site admin and activate the plugin. Check the details and make changes if necessary on the setting section and you’re done! Visit the plugin creator’s site, Synclastic to learn more.
Not a WordPress user? Don’t fret. you may cut and paste from our Privacy Policy section. Just make sure to change all the details to reflect your own site. OR we found this simple and effective Privacy Policy from JenSense which you may also cut and paste. Remember to fill in the necessary information relating to your site.
Privacy Policy for ____.com
The privacy of our visitors to ____.com is important to us.
At _____.com, we recognize that privacy of your personal information is important. Here is information on what types of personal information we receive and collect when you use visit _____.com, and how we safeguard your information. We never sell your personal information to third parties.
Log Files
As with most other websites, we collect and use the data contained in log files. The information in the log files include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP (internet service provider, such as AOL or Shaw Cable), the browser you used to visit our site (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), the time you visited our site and which pages you visited throughout our site.
Cookies and Web Beacons
We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site. This could include only showing you a popup once in your visit, or the ability to login to some of our features, such as forums.
We also use third party advertisements on ____.com to support our site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP , the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).
You can chose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.
AdSense Privacy Policy Provided by <a href=”http://www.JenSense.com”>JenSense</a>
OR now that you have examples, you may decide to create your own Privacy Policy and give it your fresh twist. PLEASE don’t forget to give credit where it’s due! Do not remove the backlinks from where you got the information.
Read and know more of Google’s own Privacy Policy here.
Posted May 17th, 2008
by admin
Did you notice Google’s laser logo in its homepage yesterday? It is a tribute to Theodore Maiman who made the first laser operate on 16 May 1960 in California. Clicking on the logo, directs you to the Google search results for the keyword “first laser.”
On top of the result were images relating to the first laser. An article from University of Chicago Press comes first on the list while Wikipedia comes second. The third, fourth and so on are what’s interesting as Google showed the most recent articles discussing the keyword “first laser.”
Whoever caught on the keyword first and created an article gets lucky to land up on the first page of Google. This SEO strategy we have touched, on an earlier article, how Google Hypes Up Recent Web Pages showing the latest articles on a particular keyword at that given moment.
Are you fast enough to catch on the next Google logo keyword? We’ll be watching.
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