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Home » duplicate content

duplicate content

July 26, 2019 by Bill Treloar 4 Comments

How to Avoid a Google Penalty

On July 26, 2019 / Google, malware, page content, SEO practices, user experience / 4 Comments

Oops! Don't run afoul of a Google penalty.Some “Google Penalties” Aren’t

Colloquially, the term “Google penalty”, usually means anything on your website that is harming your rankings. According to Google, though, a “penalty” is a manual action taken by Google that negatively affects your rankings.

Manual Penalties

These are real “penalties”.  If you get hit with a manual penalty, you should see evidence from that in your Google Search Console. Normally Google will identify exactly what you’ve done that they don’t like. So obviously, you should fix whatever that might be.
Google penalties will reduce your online visibility and traffic.
Once you’ve fixed the offending practice on your site, you can ask Google to re-index your site with the corrective actions implemented. Normally that will restore you to Google’s good graces and eliminate the penalty. This doesn’t happen immediately, though, and you can expect the delay of possibly weeks before you see your rankings improve.

Algorithm penalties

There are a number of things that might happen on your website that can negatively affect your rankings without incurring a manual penalty. I call those algorithm penalties because they’re just a normal result of Google’s algorithms evaluating the content on your site. Here are a few of the most common ones.

How to avoid the most common Google penalties.

Click To Tweet

  • Free hosting services
    • If you’re cutting costs by using a free hosting service, there is one common attribute of those that can get you in trouble with Google. That’s when the hosting service compensates for the free service they’re giving you by adding advertising to your web pages. Some of  that advertising may be pretty spammy, and Google is not likely to be happy with it.
  • Malware
    • If your website has been infected by any viruses, Trojans, or spyware, you’ll get hit with one of these penalties. Make sure your website is malware-free. The GlobalSign blog has some excellent suggestions on how to find malware on your site and how to protect against it. You can check that out here.
  • Thin content
    • Many websites for visually oriented businesses overly rely on images on their pages and have very little text. Those photos or graphics could be pictures of your pet cat as far as Google can tell. Google can read the alternate text behind your images (you do have that, right?), but other than that images do little to help Google understand what your page is about.
    • Aside from that, if you’re overly concerned about brevity on your pages, you can run into the same problem. If there’s too little text content on your pages, regardless of why, you may be penalized for thin content.
    • You can also run into those pages being considered “duplicate content” if the actual body content of the page pales in size with other elements on the page that are common to all pages on your website (think footers, sidebars, and so forth). In this case you may be facing the plagiarism penalty (see below).
  • Keyword stuffing
    • This is an ancient SEO technique to make sure your targeted keyword phrase appears many times on the page. This used to work with some early search engines. But it provides a very poor user experience for those trying to read your content. Google is smart enough to identify that and consider it a negative ranking factor. I still see this from time to time.
  • Plagiarism
    • Duplicate dogs are fine. Duplicate content? Not so much.If you copied significant amounts of content from another website (even if you own that other website) Google considers it to be duplicate content. Google is excellent at identifying duplicate content and will usually try to show only the oldest of those duplicate pages. If you think about it, it’s pretty obvious that there is little benefit to the user if Google shows a bunch of pages that all say the same thing. So Google doesn’t do that. If the content on your page is not original, it may never show up in Google search results.
    • I see this sometimes on websites designed by vertical web services. These are companies that specialize in a particular kind of businesses like handyman services, dental practices, plumbers, etc. The often have lots of excellent pre-written content about the kinds of services these businesses provide. One problem with this is that many other businesses in your niche may use the same pre-written content that ends up on your website. Bingo: you have duplicate content! If you use such a company, please ensure that the content they put on your pages is unique to you.

We can help!

If you’re concerned that you might be at risk for some of these penalties, give us a call. We can review your website with you over the phone at no cost and help you understand any potential issues that may be lurking there.

We value your opinions! Let us know what you think of this in the comments below.

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June 9, 2014 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

Should You Avoid a Niche-Designed Website?

On June 9, 2014 / page content, web design / Leave a Comment

Niche Websites: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

search-magnifying-glassThere are web design and hosting companies out there that focus on a specific industry or niche. Some create only Realtor websites, others specialize in car repair shop websites, some do only podiatrist websites, and so on. They have advantages and disadvantages, and for some situations they may be the perfect solution. But for others, they can be a very bad solution despite how attractive the process might appear.

The Good in niche websites

  • Considering their specialty, they may understand your target market or readership perfectly; better than other web designers.
  • Often you’ll have a single point of contact for web design, web programming, content writing, etc. instead of different individuals.
  • They may integrate with your back office systems like practice management systems, CRM (Customer Relations Management) systems, etc.
  • They may offer specialized, pre-programmed tools to enhance your website; things like mortgage calculators, diagnostic questionnaires, etc.
  • They may have pre-written content that can really expand and flesh out your website.

The Bad in niche websites

  • You may get stuck. If you’re unhappy with pricing or customer service, you may be unable to pick up your website and plunk it down at another web hosting company.
  • If you’re stuck, you may find yourself at the mercy of abnormally high recurring costs for your hosting.
  • Once you’re stuck, the company may have less motivation to update your site to current standards and your site may begin to look stale.
  • Limited templates may mean your site looks like a lot of other websites that are in your niche.
  • In some cases, you don’t own the rights to the content on your site; it may be legally owned by the website creator, not you, the website owner. That means if you want to move your site away from them, all the content needs to be rewritten from scratch.

The Ugly in niche websites — sometimes

You may be in a niche that doesn’t require SEO. Not every website needs to draw visitors from search engines. Someone new to a community may search online for a pediatrician or a podiatrist, but someone who needs a brain surgeon is very unlikely to search the web to find one. If you’re that brain surgeon, you rely on referrals from other doctors and patients, and your website serves to provide information to people who have already been referred to you. For you, a niche-specific website may be perfect.

But if you’re like most website owners you need to attract new customers, clients and patients via your website. You need to show up in search engines when people look for what you sell or what services you provide. Here is where niche-designed websites may get ugly.

Some may not permit many optimization techniques that will help your website show up for the searches your target is looking for.

Google hates duplicate contentBut perhaps the ugliest thing is something I listed above as a good thing: They almost all offer pre-written content for your website. If you’re a podiatrist, say, they may have content about bunions, ingrown toenails, ankle injuries, plantar fasciitis, and many other conditions of the foot and ankle. Good, right?

Not really.

Pre-written content in niche-designed websites may be duplicate content that hurts rankings.

Click To Tweet

The Danger of Duplicate Content

Let’s say you want patients suffering from bunions to find you online. If a dozen local podiatrists have a page about bunions that says the same thing on all of their sites, Google is very unlikely to show more than one of them in search results. What good does it do the searcher if every one of the top ten results has exactly the same information for them?

How likely is this to happen? Well, in a search for a local doctor who treats bunions, I found a podiatrist’s web page that began with this sentence: “A bunion is a bone deformity caused by an enlargement of the joint at the base and side of the big toe (metatarsophalangeal joint).” That page has a good deal of relevant, interesting content. But then when I searched in Google for that precise sentence, I found quite literally thousands of web pages (2,800 to be exact) with exactly the same content. The likelihood that multiple podiatrists serving the same geographical community have the same page on their websites is very high. Any two or three such podiatrists are almost certainly not all going to show up on the first page of Google because of that duplicate content issue.

Those websites will be fine as brochure websites for people who already know the name of the doctor or medical practice, but almost worthless in terms of attracting people looking for a podiatrist on Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Does your experience with a niche-designed website support or contradict this? Let us know in the comments below.

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May 20, 2011 by Bill Treloar 2 Comments

Recovery From Google’s Panda Update

On May 20, 2011 / Google, links, SEO practices, user experience / 2 Comments

Googles Panda Algorithm change hurt lots of small businesses.Google’s recent algorithm update named Panda has caused many websites to lose rankings in a big way. Most deserved it, but not all.

Earlier this month, NPR ran a story about a furniture store called One Way Furniture that had been hurt badly by Panda, mainly due to its use of canned product descriptions, which they copied from their manufacturers’ listings.

Apparently Panda identified the duplicate content and downgraded the value of the pages at One Way Furniture. There are some other suspected factors at work in their rankings plummet as well. Now they’re slowly climbing back to their pre-Panda rankings through a lot of effort:

  • Removing duplicate content and rewriting product descriptions
  • Using the canonical HTML tag to resolve multiple URLs that point to the same page
  • Proper use of 301 redirects
  • Paying close attention to their page speed
  • Constantly building backlinks.
  • One of the things they did was to hire some new copywriters to write original product descriptions aimed at being search engine friendly, and not duplicates of manufacturer descriptions.
Recovering from a Google Algorithm Change

Click To Tweet

CEO Mitch Lieberman said

For example, a bar stool that previously used a manufacturer-supplied bullet list of details as its product description now has a five-sentence description that details how it can complement a bar set-up, links to bar accessories and sets the tone by mentioning alcoholic beverages, all of which makes it more SEO-friendly. What we’re seeing now is what is good for customers and what they see on the site is also good for Google.

Another online publication that was badly hurt by Panda, DaniWeb, published a recovery story earlier this month. They cited their own reasons for the hit and what they’ve  been doing to get out of it:

“I guess it also goes without saying that it’s also important to constantly build backlinks, It is entirely possible/plausible that Google’s Panda algorithm hit all of the low quality sites that were just syndicating and linking back to us (with no unique content of their own), ultimately discrediting half of the sites in our backlink portfolio, killing our traffic indirectly. Therefore, it isn’t that we got flagged by Panda’s algorithm, but rather that we just need to work on building up more backlinks.”

Their experience reminds us to be vigilant:

  • Perhaps Google’s page speed factor is more heavily weighted than we thought.
  • And maintaining fresh inbound links from reputable websites is always important.

Need help with your small business SEO? Let’s talk!

April 6, 2006 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

Duplicate Content: How Does it Affect Your Rankings?

On April 6, 2006 / page content / Leave a Comment

Richard Drawhorn has written a good article for the MarketPosition Newsletter that sheds light on the problem of duplicate content and how search engines deal with it.
If search engines detect duplicate content on your web site, it can hurt your rankings because they consider it a form of spam. In his article, Drawhorn reviews some of the ways duplicate content may appear on your site and a few strategies to avoid being penalized by search engines.
In general, the rule of thumb to follow when creating content for your web site is this: The same content should never be available from more than one URL. Very simple.
If your web site violates that rule, then your rankings in the search engines will suffer. You should get rid of any blatant or obvious violations of this rule ASAP.

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