Author: Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the President and resident blogger for McCord Web Services LLC. She has been providing global web services since 2001. She is a web designer, search engine marketing professional, and search engine and blog expert. She lives in Maryland just south of the Washington DC metro area.
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Google Focuses on Ridding Their Index of Duplicate Content

In a recent blog post, Matt Cutts, a Google Engineer and high profile personality in my industry stated:

“My post mentioned that “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.” Read the full article.

That’s big news for legitimate businesses like mine that are commonly scraped or have content stolen and used on other websites without my approval. Several years ago Google introduced a patent that had identification of duplicate content as its core technology. I wondered at that time how Google was going to determine who the original content owner was. I wondered if a new meta tag would be introduced that allowed us to tag ourselves as owners of original content.

As of today, no new meta tag has surfaced but we do advocate one best practice to our clients, and that is to post the content on your own website first.

What Matt Cutts of Google is addressing here is not duplicate content on article networks, but rather what we in my industry call scrapers. Scrapers are robot tools or disreputable website owners that just steal your content and then place it on their website.

In many cases these scrapers are really stealing content to beef up AdSense advertisement websites. Meaning that they are not really in competition with you and your services, but hope to make money off of someone clicking their ad when they visit their site to read your stolen content.

Thank goodness Google is finally addressing this issue. I for one believe that my site will benefit from this action.

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Why Not Put Just a Wee Bit of Content on Your Home Page

I get asked this question a lot “Why do big companies just have a wee bit of content on their home page?”. There are several reasons why a website owner would want just a wee bit of content on their home page but nearly all reasons will not help you to garner search engine placement.

  1. Mistaken idea that the home page should be “pretty” and not have much content but lots of images.
  2. Mistaken idea that the home page is not important.
  3. Missed opportunities to introduce the depth and breadth of the website.

When I first started in web design 10 years ago, splash pages were the rage. A splash page  is where you had a graphic intense home page that had little if any content and was very different in look from the inside pages of your website. We have now moved away from this model as an industry. Now nearly every SEO and web design expert consider the home page crucial real estate for search engine placement.

You simply cannot garner the organic search placement you need to be competitive in today’s online marketplace with images or Flash components (that search engines cannot read) as key factors on your home page. For small to medium sized businesses the best plan is to have a keyword dense, web authority focused home page.

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With Facebook and Twitter, Do You Still Need Blogging?

Many clients are now investing time and money on keeping Twitter and Facebook updated so with all of that do you still need your blog updated? Absolutely!

If your blog is installed under your own domain and resides on your website server then adding to your blog benefits the organic placement of your website as you build blog content. Twitter and Facebook are important ways to engage customers, search engines are starting to look at your activity on these networks as part of their SocialRank scale which impacts organic placement, but activity on these platforms does not build website content like blogging does.

When it comes to choosing where your money is best spent to improve organic search placement I like blogging best, then Facebook and finally Twitter. I place Facebook above Twitter as Facebook is where your prospects are spending a significant part of their time and I feel it is important to engage them where they are active.

Although SocialRank does not carry the same weight in organic placement as PageRank, both Google and Bing are actively now monitoring SocialRank. I feel that over time the activity you have on Facebook and Twitter will become more important in affecting your organic placement and where you appear in personalized search results.

In fact for national businesses involvement and engagement on Facebook and Twitter may be key to mitigating the focus of localize search results in organic placement that Google and Bing are both pushing at this time. I say that as search results are now personalized and focus heavily on showing results in your geographic area, but also include a social component where personal connections and interconnections are a factor of the results you see as well.

We invite you to find our more about our services for blog writing, Facebook updates, and Twitter writing if you have a need.

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Are You Trashing Up Your Website?

After a new website is launched, we do encourage all clients to routinely add to their website as it should be considered a work in progress. However sometimes in an effort to improve the site over time, the client ends up adding too many peripheral items that can impact the look of the site and the reader’s experience.

Particularly I have seen sites move from a “clean” polished look to a jumble when an indiscriminate amount of items are added to right or left side bars. Typically adding new content in the middle body section does not impact the overall look, but when you add to the sidebars, watch out!

It makes sense that if your page design has a left sidebar for features that you rotate features, but when you add, add, add, and never remove the site can start to look overly busy and become distracting to the reader. Add moving or animated graphics to this jumble, and suddenly your site takes on a “junky” look. I recommend that if you feel that you will have special promotions or features that you want in a sidebar location that you have these items integrated into your website design layout ahead of time, then stick with the number in the original design and rotate as needed. You can even have a features page linked from the sidebar and use the actual features page to highlight even more items.

The key here is to have smart growth, consider adding pages instead of sidebar features, add to your navigation instead of creating graphic boxes or highlights that site only on your sidebars. Keep your website looking “fresh” as your designer intended and don’t “cheapen” the look over time.