Content, Keywords, and Duplicate Content

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Content, Keywords, and Duplicate Content
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Two major roles for Content

• Spider food
• Search engines will find key phrases in your
  content
• Increases your chances of ranking for those
  phrases
• Provides exposure to the long tail of search
• Attract links
• People link to great stuff, so
• Give them something to link to!

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Spider Food Example

• Page Title New York Used Cars
• Content
• We offer used cars in Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany,
  White Plains, New York City, and more!
• Creates the possibility of matching for Albany
  Used Cars

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Content is for Users Too

• Cant forget that!
• Optimizing for search engines is fine, but dont
  scare users away from your site
• Also, people dont link to sites with crappy
  content
• We will talk more about links later!

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Keyword Research

• Tools for brainstorming a seed list
• Google Suggest (now integrated into Google
  search)
• Yahoo Assist
• Tools to check popularity of keyword searches
• Wordtracker
• Trellians Keyword Discovery
• Googles Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Google Trends
• Google Insights for Search

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Google Suggest

• Originally a separate testing lab in beta, rolled
  into web search August 2008.
• Search volume inferred based on order, but no
  quantifiable value.

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Google Suggest

• Pros
• Free!
• Data is from Google search data
• Provides live suggestions as you type
• Cons
• No quantifiable data
• Based on typing order

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Yahoo Assist

• Part of Yahoo Search
• Kicks in when delay while entering search phrases
• Word can match any part of search phrase

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Yahoo Assist

• Pros
• Free!
• Data is from Yahoo search data
• Provides live suggestions as you type
• Typed phrases can match anywhere within the
  suggestions
• Cons
• No quantifiable data

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Wordtracker

• Enter in keywords search phrases to be expound
  upon.
• Build out a project with relevant terms.
• Use for brainstorming as well as drilling down
  into specific phrases.
• Obtain quantifiable search numbers.

Free version freekeywords.wordtracker.com
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Wordtracker

• Pros
• Based on last 130 days worth of searches
• Singular vs. plural, misspellings, verb tenses
  all separated out
• Advanced functionality keyword projects,
  import data into Excel, synonyms,
• Cons
• Full product requires subscription fee (59/month
  or 329/year)
• Data is from a small sample of Internet searches
  (from the minor search engines Dogpile and
  MetaCrawler).
• Contains bogus data from automated searches
• No historical archives

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Keyword Discovery

• Similar features as Wordtracker.
• Trend graphs provide a visual that goes beyond
  total searches.
• Various settings to refine data.
• Note plural setting only pluralizes the last
  word.

Free version www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
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Keyword Discovery

• Pros
• Full year of historical archives
• Data is from a larger sample of Internet searches
• Singular vs. plural, misspellings, verb tenses
  all separated out
• Can segment by country
• Advanced functionality keyword projects,
  import data into Excel, synonyms,
• Cons
• Access to the historical data requires
  subscription fee (69.95/month or 599.40/year).
• Contains bogus data from automated searches

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Google AdWords Keyword Tool

• Enter in lists of terms.
• Pull terms from a web page.
• Search volume
• Switch to Exact match
• Show Search Volume Trends column.

Free version adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToo
lExternal
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Google AdWords Keyword Tool

• Pros
• Free!
• Accessing within Google AdWords yields more
  features
• Data is from a large sample of Internet searches
  (from Google)
• Singular vs. plural, misspellings, verb tenses
• Can segment by country (within AdWords)
• Synonyms
• Monthly average search volumes
• Cons
• Numbers are approximations

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Google Trends
www.google.com/trends

• Provides a graphical, relative search volume
  comparison.
• Enter in up to 5 search terms.
• Shows related news.
• Sign-in to get relative ranking.

Whats the busiest time of year for chocolate?
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Chocolate
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Google Trends

• Pros
• Free!
• Signing into Google account provides additional
  detail features
• Data is from a large sample of Internet searches
  (from Google)
• Shows related news searches
• Can segment by region or sub-region
• Filter by time frame
• Spot seasonal trends
• Cons
• Numbers are purely relational to the query set
• No way to export
• Only preset data filtering
• Limited to broad, popular search phrases

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Google Insights for Search

• Similar to Google Trends
• Additional unique features
• Compare against a category
• Geographic search volume maps
• Provides a relative index measure against all
  searches performed on Google over time.

www.google.com/insights/search/
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Easy to Drill Into Regional Data
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Google Insights for Search

• Pros
• Free!
• Signing into Google account provides additional
  detail features
• Data is from a large sample of Internet searches
  (from Google)
• Shows related news searches
• Can segment by region subregion
• Filter by time frame, even custom date ranges
• Export as CSV
• Cons
• Numbers are a normalized index
• Limited to broad, popular search phrases

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Competitiveness

• Competition for that keyword should also be
  considered
• Calculate KEI Score (Keyword Effectiveness
  Indicator) ratio of searches over number of
  pages in search results.
• The higher the KEI Score, the more attractive the
  keyword is to target (assuming its relevant to
  your business).
• Perform advanced searches to determine difficulty
• digital cameras
• intitledigital cameras

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Duplicate Content
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Syndicating Exact Copies BAD
NYTimes.com
Syndicate-NYTimes.com
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What if your search results looked like this?
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How Search Engines Prevent It

• Identify Duplicate Content
• Pick One as a Winner
• Ignore the Rest
• Helps prevent poor quality search experiences
  such as that shown on the prior slide

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Picking the Winner

• Where Google first saw the content
• Trust in the domain
• Best link graph
• Do copies link back to the original?
• Does it look like it was scraped?
• Only if its close, PageRank

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Detecting Duplicate Content

• Navigation / Templates ignored
• Simple Text comparisons
• Shingles (will illustrate in a moment)
• Factor out word substitution
• Content does not have to match exactly to be
  duplicate
• What makes a duplicate?
• Not published by search engines,
• changes over time

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Word Substitution

• Our San Diego pizzas are the finest available.
  We provide high quality San Diego pizzas to
• Our San Jose pizzas are the finest available. We
  provide high quality San Jose pizzas to
• This is still duplicate content!

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Reordering Content Does not Help
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This is the Same Page!
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Text Based Example

• The clueless fool decided to make the best of it
  by going to find
• However, he kept bumping his head into the door,
  which led to a severe lowering of his already
  limited intellect

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And this is the Same Content!

• However, he kept bumping his head into the door,
  which led to a severe lowering of his already
  limited intellect
• The clueless fool decided to make the best of it
  by going to find

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How Dupe Content is Created

• Faceted Navigation (sort by price, sort by color
  )
• Session IDs on URLs ?id890889089
• Different URLs resolving to the same content
• http//www.domain.com/content17
• http//domain.com/content17
• https//www.domain.com/content17
• Affiliate programs
• http//www.domain.com/content17?afidstone
• Syndicating content

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Costs of Duplicate Content

• Wasted Crawl Budget
• Search engines limit how much they will crawl a
  site during a given day
• Time spent crawling dupes is wasted
• Valuable (non-dupe) pages may not get crawled
• Wasted PageRank / link juice
• Links to dupes provide no value

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Solutions

• In priority order
• Simply eliminate it
• 301 redirect un-needed copies to preferred
  version
• Canonical tag
• ltlink rel"canonical" href"http//www.example.com
  /product.php?itemswedish-fish" /gt
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of the dupes
• If syndicating content
• Syndicate content not published on your site
• Differentiate content via added content (e.g.
  UGC)
• Include a link back to the original article

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Watch for Pseudo-Dupes

• This is content on your site which competes for
  the same keywords
• Once again, the search engines will pick one, and
  ignore the others!

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Duplicate Title Tags

• Check for duplication
• Use special queries with Google to find
  duplication.
• Over 9,000 duplicates of this title alone what
  does it say to Google?
• Purely duplicate titles
• Canonicalization
• Parameters URL bloat
• Sitedomain.com intitletitle

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Google Helps Find Duplication

• Googles Webmaster Central
• Alerted to duplicate titles

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Thank You!

• Eric Enge
• eenge_at_stonetemple.com
• _at_stonetemple
• [phone]

http//www.stonetemple.com/blog
http//searchengineland.com/author/eric-enge
http//searchenginewatch.com/sew_author_fullarchi
veauthor3624376 http//www.seomoz.org/users/vie
w/18040 http//www.instantetraining.com/
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