How We Increased Website Traffic by 150% by Fixing Duplicate Content

January 26, 2013 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

Most people outside the industry think that Technical SEO is all about on page optimization, in other words; updating a page’s meta data and content to have the right keywords in it. However there is another aspect of Technical SEO that has nothing with keywords and can be very powerful for larger dynamic websites. This discipline makes sure the site is search engine crawler friendly by making sure the search bots can find all the pages and also that there are not multiple URLs for a single page, also known as duplicate content. Duplicate content within a site is more common that you might think and I have repeatedly seen significant traffic increases by eliminating it. This is a case study of how we addressed over-indexation of duplicate content by Google and increased traffic by more than 150% overall.

The site in question is a B2B eCommerce site which does a brisk business on weekdays but has much lower traffic during the weekends and holidays. The chart below tracks its weekly non branded organic search traffic for the last 9 months. Here “non branded” means that we exclude organic traffic that arrives via company and domain name keywords, however note we do include product keywords which is a significant part of their traffic.

non branded organic traffic
Non Branded Organic Traffic – Weekly

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Google disavow tool – Do you need it?

October 29, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

GoogleIt’s never boring in SEO land. Last week the SEOsphere was all abuzz with the October 16th release of the Google disavow links tool. This past summer I, like many other SEOs, have been quite busy doing “Penguin recoveries”. This name, although convenient, is actually misleading, most sites I’ve been helping aren’t recovering from Penguin itself, but rather from manual penalties imposed by Google. The difference? Penguin is an algorithmic change that that focuses on the quality of the backlinks to your site, and lowers your ranking if much of your backlink profile quality is low and spammy, while a manual penalty is an action taken by a human and usually accompanied by a “unnatural links warning” message in GWMT (google webmaster tools). With Penguin, if you clean up the problem, your site should recover in time, with a manual penalty you have to submit a reconsideration request to get your traffic back.

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Determining Google indexation of your Site

October 15, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

What is Google indexation?

What we mean by indexation is the pages that Google has crawled of your site and put into its index. When you type in a search term into Google, it then uses the index as a repository to retrieve pages to show in the search engine results pages. Just because a search engine has crawled a page on your site doesn’t mean that it puts it into the index. For one thing you might have told it not to index it. Or Google might have decided it’s not worthy of being indexed.

What has Google indexed from your site?

To see whether Google has indexed your site at all, type the following query into Google, replacing your domain name for “foo.com” below.

site:www.foo.com

If you get a list of URLs you are in business, if you don’t then the simplest way to get your site indexed is to add a link back to your site from a social media network such as Twitter or LinkedIn. Assuming your site is indexed, the next step is click through the pages (at the bottom of the search result page) to see what Google has indexed. You might be surprised.

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Does the meta description tag help SEO?

October 1, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

SEO: Search Engine OptimizationIt doesn’t help. At least not directly. Does that surprise you? Why then, you might be asking, does each SEO article you read about meta tags strongly recommend that you have meta description tags on each page of your website? Because SEO shouldn’t be your only focus when improving your website. And it is true that meta description tags may help your site perform better in the search engine results, albeit indirectly.

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Google Addresses Copyright Issues

August 13, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

Google has ramped up the fight against online piracy by putting more teeth into how it addresses copyright issues and violations. Content stealing and scraping (including images and video) is all too common on the web, up to now the main tool Google offered was the ability to file a DMCA takedown request. A DMCA takedown request, if deemed valid had the potential of removing the offending web page from Google’s index, but did not impact the rest of the site. That has now changed.

Hollywood has long criticized (and sued) Google for not doing enough to protect original content from being stolen and copied. Hollywood in particular hates YouTube. Of course, in this author’s humble opinion, Hollywood doesn’t help its case by clinging to the old dated notion that one needs to have cable to get the latest shows. Perhaps if it made more content legitimately available on the web; via Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, the piracy problem would get better. This cartoon from the Oatmeal sums it up perfectly. I too would love to watch the Game of Thrones series and I’m willing to pay a one time cost for it, but I am definitely not willing to resubscribe to premium cable just for the privilege. I was also rather appalled at the amount of ads (on every page refresh!) NBC made you sit through after paying to stream the Olympics online.

That being said, copyright violations is a real problem for bloggers as I have blogged about previously. I’ve also written an article on how to use images in your blog without violating copyright.

Now DMCA takedowns will have more impact, on August 10, 2012 Google announced on its blog that “valid copyright removal notices” will become a new signal for its rankings. What does this mean? As is typical for Google, the announcement is vague on the details, but if your website receives “enough” (the number is undetermined) DMCA notices from Google, the entire site will start rank lower in Google’s search results pages. So no longer is just one page affected, your entire site can be impacted by the notices. The idea, of course, is that the worst offenders will no longer rank as well as the original content.

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Has your site been hit by Google Penguin?

May 7, 2012 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

SEO: Search Engine OptimizationGoogle changes have been coming fast and furious. Over the last few months:

  • Matt Cutts announced in March that a “over optimization” penalty was coming.
  • Soon after that, many sites received a “unnatural links have been detected ..” message in GWMT (Google Webmaster Tools).
  • A Google Panda update was released on April 19, 2012.
  • Google Penguin was released on April 24, 2012.
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