Avoiding duplicate content and Question about SEO

[Aboudie]

hi, I'm working on my site right now and so far have a a good number of unique articles. I've been hearing a lot about duplicate content and how it could negatively affect my ranking and so on. Now there are a few things that I plan on doing that i am not sure if it would be considered duplicate content

1. I want to place respective blogs on their respective pages, but i also want everything to go to my static home page as well to be shown in excerpts . If content is on static home page and on another page would that be considered a duplicate content?

2. I'm new to IM and have never done anything design related. I noticed that post have their own URL content, now if i already have excerpts and or if it is already shown in another page does that count as duplicate content?

3. As i was searching for the answers about this questions and SEO related, I read that you should try to make URL as discrpitive as possible without making it too long. My Question is how long is too long? For instance, mydomainname.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/word-word-word-word

Would this be considered too long?

4. Should I enable links on my images? Like if they click on the image it would link to the image and open up a new tab for that image?


I got a few of my questions arealdy answered thanks to this great site and the search button..However, i cant seem to figure out the answer to this.

[ralph.m]

In my opinion (and there are lots of opinions on this subject!) the answer to the first three questions is certainly No. As for links to images, if it serves a useful purpose (like lining to a larger version), then certainly, yes.

I don't see a problem with longer URLs. It's handy if it clearly says what the page is about. 4 words is certainly not too many. Many high ranking pages have many more words than that in their URL. They rank highly because they have great content, so people link to it.

[benbob]

1. I want to place respective blogs on their respective pages, but i also want everything to go to my static home page as well to be shown in excerpts . If content is on static home page and on another page would that be considered a duplicate content? ...

Content that is published a second time, is at risk of being marked as duplicate regardless of where it is published. Posting the same thing the second time has no added value for the user and as such the algorithms won't like it.

3. As i was searching for the answers about this questions and SEO related, I read that you should try to make URL as discrpitive as possible without making it too long. My Question is how long is too long? For instance, mydomainname.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/word-word-word-word
Would this be considered too long?...

I recommend sticking your blog directly in the root, and let WP software do the rest. A good blog is a very important part of your site, both for your visitors and SEO; the less you mess with it, the better.

In general terms: don't try to be too clever with SEO. You are better off spending your time on producing a good website and a good blog than trying to beat the Google engineers. Remember that the O in SEO stands for Optimisation, not Obfuscation.

[Mikl]

Content that is published a second time, is at risk of being marked as duplicate regardless of where it is published. Posting the same thing the second time has no added value for the user and as such the algorithms won't like it.

That's true, but in this case Aboudie is not really posting the same content a second time. What he is describing is in the nature of most blogging platforms. Each blog post is a distinct entry, and appears on its own page with its own URL. But an extract (which could be anything from the first sentence to the entire post, as specified by the blogger) of the most recent posts also appears on the home page.

It is highly unlikely that that situation will cause any kind of SEO penalty. More importantly, it's not necessarily true that it "has no added value for the user". If a user visits a blog regularly, he will see a quick summary of the most recent posts, and he can then choose to drill down into any post that he is interested in. If, on the other hand, he arrives directly at a particularly post by searching for some specific information, he will see exactly the post he needs, and can choose to ignore the rest of the blog. Either way, the user gets what he wants.

For both those reasons, Aboudie, my advice would be to leave things as they are. It is the standard way that most blogs work, and there's no evidence that it does any harm.

As for your question about long URLs, your URLs should ideally contain at least one of your important keywords, but without overdoing it. More importantly, you should plan your URLs so that they are convenient for your visitors. But even that is not all that important, given that most people will find your site by clicking on links from other sites, search results or emails.

Mike

[benbob]

Posting a copy ( whether or not bits have been deleted ) of a website page again as a blog, is not good, nor is spinning a new version of it. Taking a long webpage e.g. 1000-1500 words as a "source of inspiration" and writing a summary of it as a new and separate effort, is fine.
Algorithms get smarter every day (twice a day in case of Google) and are likely to arrive fairly soon at a point where they can spot spin almost as well as the human brain can. That means it is not so much a matter of how you can cheat today, but what is likely to improve your ranking for the next couple of years and what is likely to be counter acted by Google's engineers. One of the ruling principles of Google, is that they want to see stuff that is helpful for visitors, and as such, it is very easy to figure out what will help for the foreseeable future and what not. A page reposted with half the content deleted is not "original" and is unlikely to be judged as helpful, whereas an "newly composed" synopsis clearly is a new bit of work.

[Aboudie]

In my opinion (and there are lots of opinions on this subject!) the answer to the first three questions is certainly No. As for links to images, if it serves a useful purpose (like lining to a larger version), then certainly, yes.

I don't see a problem with longer URLs. It's handy if it clearly says what the page is about. 4 words is certainly not too many. Many high ranking pages have many more words than that in their URL. They rank highly because they have great content, so people link to it.

It's true that there are different opinions on this matter, it seems like though the vast majority, ( asked different people to get different opinions) agree with you on this matter

Content that is published a second time, is at risk of being marked as duplicate regardless of where it is published. Posting the same thing the second time has no added value for the user and as such the algorithms won't like it.



I recommend sticking your blog directly in the root, and let WP software do the rest. A good blog is a very important part of your site, both for your visitors and SEO; the less you mess with it, the better.

In general terms: don't try to be too clever with SEO. You are better off spending your time on producing a good website and a good blog than trying to beat the Google engineers. Remember that the O in SEO stands for Optimisation, not Obfuscation.

Tbh, i'm not really trying to be cleaver. I just wanted to make sure that there are excerpts post in my home page so that my visitors can choose whatever blog or article they might want to read.

That's true, but in this case Aboudie is not really posting the same content a second time. What he is describing is in the nature of most blogging platforms. Each blog post is a distinct entry, and appears on its own page with its own URL. But an extract (which could be anything from the first sentence to the entire post, as specified by the blogger) of the most recent posts also appears on the home page.

It is highly unlikely that that situation will cause any kind of SEO penalty. More importantly, it's not necessarily true that it "has no added value for the user". If a user visits a blog regularly, he will see a quick summary of the most recent posts, and he can then choose to drill down into any post that he is interested in. If, on the other hand, he arrives directly at a particularly post by searching for some specific information, he will see exactly the post he needs, and can choose to ignore the rest of the blog. Either way, the user gets what he wants.

For both those reasons, Aboudie, my advice would be to leave things as they are. It is the standard way that most blogs work, and there's no evidence that it does any harm.

As for your question about long URLs, your URLs should ideally contain at least one of your important keywords, but without overdoing it. More importantly, you should plan your URLs so that they are convenient for your visitors. But even that is not all that important, given that most people will find your site by clicking on links from other sites, search results or emails.

Mike

Thanks for this very informative answer mike. I have one last question, should i disable a link to my post and let everything direct to the other page where it is more appropriate? For instance, i have an excerpt available in home page, and the full post available in another page. If they click on the post, instead of being directed to the post url, it will just direct to the page where the blog is posted in whole

[Mikl]

Aboudie, in answer to your last question, I would suggest you just leave things as they are. There's no special reason to disable the link. It does no harm in SEO terms, and users will expect it to be there. Most visitors are accustomed to the blogging platform working the way it does.

Mike

[Conran]

1. I want to place respective blogs on their respective pages, but i also want everything to go to my static home page as well to be shown in excerpts . If content is on static home page and on another page would that be considered a duplicate content?

This shouldn't be an issue, because the excerpt is "calling" the content from the correct page, and it's on your own site. If you were quoting large amounts of text on the main page rather than just calling a section of text then it might be seen differently. I would make sure that I'm simply showing a section of text from the full article, and not copy/pasting it in.

2. I'm new to IM and have never done anything design related. I noticed that post have their own URL content, now if i already have excerpts and or if it is already shown in another page does that count as duplicate content?

I'm not sure what you mean by IM. But in WordPress and others the method is to call content from the right page to display as a snippet on a main page. The content is still contained on one page, it's just presented as a link would be with a description. This shouldn't affect your SEO or the way Google views the site. As mentioned, I wouldn't be quoting entire chunks of text on several pages, but calling a small portion of text to be shown on another is not a bad thing.

3. As i was searching for the answers about this questions and SEO related, I read that you should try to make URL as discrpitive as possible without making it too long. My Question is how long is too long? For instance, mydomainname.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/word-word-word-word

I primarily use WordPress, and this allows you to have the title, such as "This is a post about blue widgets" while changing the url to be shorter, for example "http://myblog.com/category/blue-widgets". This is something to consider if you can do it, maximising the impact of the most important words in the url and keeping it short. The general rule is the shorter the better.
Don't cram the url with keywords, and don't fret about the title of a post either. Keyword use in a title is less and less relevant these days (others will argue this). I have seen one client of mine who requests all of his post titles be scene titles where a keyword is not present, and as long as I write the post to target something it does well - perhaps even better - than those with the keyword in title.

4. Should I enable links on my images? Like if they click on the image it would link to the image and open up a new tab for that image?

This is a usability issue rather than a Google/SEO issue. But then I guess if it makes the user experience better then it can be considered an SEO issue.
Think about the common method, with images usually linked to the content. It makes sense that if you have a page of posts and they all have an associated image then users will automatically try to click the image to access the post. I started an adult blog last year with a theme that had post images and a text excerpt on the main page, but the images were not clickable, so I changed the code to make all images click through to the associated post.

While it might not affect Google in any way (there is no real concrete advice about clickable images that I have ever seen) it does increase usability and it will likely increase the depth of clicks and reduce bounce rate slightly with those who just expect all images to be clickable - which is almost everyone on the net these days.

These are just my opinions. I am by no means an expert, but I have been doing this for about six years now and creating content for others is what I do for a living. I hope it helps

[Maxsun]

The best thing to do to avoid such problem is to post your content once. This way you can assure that no duplicate content will appear, your ranking will not be affected and Google will not penalized you.

[Aboudie]

Aboudie, in answer to your last question, I would suggest you just leave things as they are. There's no special reason to disable the link. It does no harm in SEO terms, and users will expect it to be there. Most visitors are accustomed to the blogging platform working the way it does.

Mike

This shouldn't be an issue, because the excerpt is "calling" the content from the correct page, and it's on your own site. If you were quoting large amounts of text on the main page rather than just calling a section of text then it might be seen differently. I would make sure that I'm simply showing a section of text from the full article, and not copy/pasting it in.



I'm not sure what you mean by IM. But in WordPress and others the method is to call content from the right page to display as a snippet on a main page. The content is still contained on one page, it's just presented as a link would be with a description. This shouldn't affect your SEO or the way Google views the site. As mentioned, I wouldn't be quoting entire chunks of text on several pages, but calling a small portion of text to be shown on another is not a bad thing.



I primarily use WordPress, and this allows you to have the title, such as "This is a post about blue widgets" while changing the url to be shorter, for example "http://myblog.com/category/blue-widgets". This is something to consider if you can do it, maximising the impact of the most important words in the url and keeping it short. The general rule is the shorter the better.
Don't cram the url with keywords, and don't fret about the title of a post either. Keyword use in a title is less and less relevant these days (others will argue this). I have seen one client of mine who requests all of his post titles be scene titles where a keyword is not present, and as long as I write the post to target something it does well - perhaps even better - than those with the keyword in title.



This is a usability issue rather than a Google/SEO issue. But then I guess if it makes the user experience better then it can be considered an SEO issue.
Think about the common method, with images usually linked to the content. It makes sense that if you have a page of posts and they all have an associated image then users will automatically try to click the image to access the post. I started an adult blog last year with a theme that had post images and a text excerpt on the main page, but the images were not clickable, so I changed the code to make all images click through to the associated post.

While it might not affect Google in any way (there is no real concrete advice about clickable images that I have ever seen) it does increase usability and it will likely increase the depth of clicks and reduce bounce rate slightly with those who just expect all images to be clickable - which is almost everyone on the net these days.

These are just my opinions. I am by no means an expert, but I have been doing this for about six years now and creating content for others is what I do for a living. I hope it helps

I appreciate the answers. Hope I can thank you guys in other forms...

[Ng_Xen]

Avoid over optimizing. Yes, make your url descriptive and as short as possible. The problem with this is you tend to stuff your keys in. I don't really mind just letting what the url should be when a post gets live as this should make my url more natural and not being under SEO control. For the image, you can add a link if you want to. Just avoid putting too many links in a page.

[dmitrym]

If you have two pages that are displaying the same content (your first question) you want the credit to go towards the original static page.

In this instance you can use the canonical link element which was created specifically to solve the duplicate content issue.

Place <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/original-content"> in the <head> section of the page that is displaying the duplicate content. When a search engine find the link element on the page displaying duplicate content it will do a soft 301 redirect and transfer most of the link value gathered by that page to the canonical page.

Hope this helps!

[ushahm01]

if you use duplicate content in your website or blog it will be considered as blackhat techniques and google will penalize for that websites.so always put unique and fresh content.if you have two or more pages with similar content then you can go for canonical page and tell for search engine which is your prefered page to display in search engine results.

[Stevie D]

if you use duplicate content in your website or blog it will be considered as blackhat techniques and google will penalize for that websites.

That isn't quite true. If you have the same content on several pages, you are unlikely to rank as well, but that isn't because you are being penalised for using 'black hat' techniques – see this post on duplicate content for a more detailed explanation.