Internet Marketing Strategies, Resources, Tips & Advice

I happened to be making some updates to my Homenotion.com site the other day and while adjusting a few things I noticed I had made an error for which I had a number of pages with duplicate content.  Yikes!  I jumped on that and made sure I fixed those problems immediately. 

But then I thought about what Google says.  Their guidelines state that my site could have potentially been removed from the Google index or my ranking could have suffered.  In which case neither happened.  My site still ranks on the first page of the natural results for all my best keywords.

So what does all this 'duplicate content' thing really mean?     

In an effort to answer that, I went back to Google and took a closer look at their duplicate content guidelines.

Here's Google's direct quote:

"Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results."

Ok, that's a little reassuring, but still, you want to make sure you don't make some inadvertent mistakes along the way, better safe than sorry.

Judging from what happened on my site, the duplicate pages simply had no pagerank. Perhaps if I'd had enough of such duplicate pages my site would have failed in the index, but I'm guessing since I wasn't really duplicating content across domains in an effort to deceive as stated above, I'm guessing I was ok.  But just to make sure I thought it was time I actually looked over Google's guidelines carefully to make sure I don't make any other mistakes.  No doubt there's a lot of good information there about how to stay in Google's good graces, but one very hot issue in this area is around the topic of syndicating your content:

There seems to be a lot of controversy on this one but frankly, I don't get too excited about it because I've syndicated lots of my articles and never really had an issue.  If you're in doubt, have a look at what Matt Cutts has to say about the topic.  Matt's the expert and I find his comments pretty accurate.

One thing to always keep in mind is try to keep your site, blogs and forum content separate.  I typically use my website for static information like product listings and descriptions, product endorsements, informational articles etc.  Use your blog for personal commenting, informative ideas, news items, questions, polls, product announcements and use your forum for advertising, individual questions and opinions. 

It also helps to use a web design software that offers tools that help you stay within search engine guidelines.  I've used Xsitepro for years and their recent upgrade has lots of built in functions that help keep me in line and please the search engines.  Additionally creating sites and blogs with Wordpress is another excellent option for creating search engine friendly sites.  

We all know that Google isn't perfect and it's often times hard to get clarification, but I'm with the belief that if you are a 'white hat' business owner, strive to "do the right thing" and use quality tools, then you should be safe, if you find you've made an error, then make adjustments suggested on Google's guidelines and submit your site for reconsideration.

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