It’s a pretty interesting question, isn’t it? I’m sure there are many Internet surfers both professional and hobbyists looking for seo tips, advices and search engine algorithm news every day. You can find a piece of valuable information on one site and still search for some supporting comments or proof of the information online.
Our next posts we’ve decide to devote to different website optimization advices, helpful tools, supportive links and we would like to invite you to participate with ideas and experience. I think many from the audience would agree with me it would be helpful to post examples from seo practices. It’s cool to talk about tips and ideas but how can you verify if they work?...
Anyway, I will start with something I know for sure works with Google.
Google is a text reader. Don’t you agree?! Just copy a sentence or a paragraph from your home page and post it in Google search box, press “Search” and what do you see? Is it your domain ranked #1 or at least on page 1? May be you can’t find your domain name listed with Google at all? Time to be concerned and look for a reputable SEO Consultant’s advice.
There is another scenario to this experiment. You can see the same copy you’ve just searched with Google but the domain name displayed is not yours. Guess what?! Yeah, somebody uses the same content or probably you have a second or third domain name which points to your original one…
To make sure nobody uses your content check this useful tool www.copyscape.com.
Here is our first tip:
- Avoid duplicate content with your website or websites! Your website can be penalized for this!
More at Google Webmaster Central.
This is really harmful and we have our own experience with one of our clients. We’ve developed a new website on a new domain name for them and absolutely new text was written for the site while the old domain had nothing to do with new content.
The new site was crawled by search engines and Google recognized the text.
After a while the client decided to make their old website to look and have the same copy like the new one and it affected our campaign with the new website. Google reads text from the old site and ignores the same copy on the new website.
More “Content” topic is coming…
Alex, Budget-SEO.com