The Social Media Landscape: Mt. Everest vs. Sir Edmund Hillary

Posted in Hot Industry Topics, Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized

What to do with twitter, Facebook and Social Media.

As the chart above lucidly shows, this is utterly confusing. Does the small business owner or brand builder use twitter, join facebook, Google Buzz, Linkedin, U Tube?

The answer is: Start out with one or two, get familiar with it and then move on. Sir Edmund Hillary did not scale Mt. Everest in one day. He trained, he strategized, he conditioned himself physically, emotionally and financially. Then he conquered the mountain that is Everest. In other words, take it slow, don’t rush, don’t get overwhelmed. Start with Facebook and then move on with care. Hiring a seasoned sherpa guide is not a bad idea, either. ………in fact, it’s mandatory for your survival.

The Merchant Maven.

The Social Web Flattens B2B Product Distribution

Depending on your industry, you are likely all too familiar with product distribution processes that involves multiple distributors, sales reps, independent sales reps, etc. All of these people used to be very important steps in a distribution process to get the product from a manufacturer to the end-user. A large and powerful world of spiffs and agreements have been created to buttress these channels of distribution.

While these powerful supply chains still exist, many are on their way to extinction. the distribution networks were created when it took a major commitment of money and man hours to have an infrastructure to sell B2B products. the Internet has greatly reduced the cost and commitment to bring a product from development to market for distribution. B2B companies are now in the process of understanding what many major retailers have known for years now. that direct sales and fulfillment through the Internet means better margins and increased efficiencies.

First Movers will Determine Industry Changes

Something I have frequently said, is that the web rewards individuals and companies who take action first. This will be no different for this issue. If companies sit back and allow distributors and independent sales reps to build the preferred online customer acquisition methods for a given industry, then companies will again lose the leverage they gained when e-commerce began on the web and will exist in an online version of the current product distribution pipeline.

Ideas For Evolving B2B Distribution

One thing that I love so much about the Internet is that it provides opportunities and solutions that haven’t been possible before. It is an easy jump to say that some manufacturers will likely sell products directly especially to certain markets like small business owners.

What is next? If that is the easy jump, then what is the hard one that likely only some elite business owners will achieve?

1. Add service-based revenue streams – Service-based businesses are hard to run, because they are completely dependent on talent and they often operate on low margins. In the future, it is likely that as B2B companies begin to rely less on distributors and current distribution models that a side benefit will be the discovery of new revenue streams. Some of the most successful web companies and open source software companies have already discovered that it can be lucrative to charge for support and additional features for free or low cost products. B2B companies will likely find that the Internet is a strong catalyst for launching these new types of revenue streams cost effectively.

2. Data will Become Even More Important – I read many conversations on the web each day about marketing and growing businesses. It is often scary to me how many of those discussions fail to mention the importance of data. When it comes to product development and distribution for B2B companies, the future is about data. the internet and the social web have turned on a firehouse of data that has the potential to empower business decisions like never before. Data will help discover emerging markets and provide direct feedback from customers on the best methods of product distribution.

3. Efficiencies Offer New Customer Acquisition Opportunities – the Internet has lowered the cost dramatically in many cases when it comes to cost of distribution. these reduced costs provide B2B companies with new decisions. This lower barrier of entry may entice some B2B business owners to diversify target markets in an effort to reach a new customer base. This will mean more competition in some industries.

” Stop Using Email: It’s a Waste of Time “

Posted in Best of the Merchant Maven: The Good, The Bad and the Irrelevant, Hot Industry Topics, Search Engine Optimization, Some Fun Stuff on the Internet, The Maven Rambles On About Life

The year was 1993: Back during the Jurassic period of corporate communications and branding. Google’s CEO and Founder Sergy Bryn and the other really, really smart guy from Russia were going out with plump communist co -eds and cheerleaders from Leningrad Senior High.

I was the Director of Marketing for a large shopping center owned and operated by the Macerich Company. Macerich was and still is a prominent REIT and owns about 70 malls in the United States.

We received a COMPANY MEMORANDUM ( remember those?) from our VP of Marketing. The subject was email. ” Email, I bellowed synically? What the heck is email? “

The memorandum was sent to all Marketing Directors and we were told that email was the wave of the future. Things would be different now. We would become modern communicators. Email would make our lives easier. We would become more efficient.

“Yeah, right. I said to myself. Sounds like another pain in the neck software nonsense I have to learn !”

Grudingly I began to use email communications. My regional director would call me twice a week and ask: “Did you get my email? I would confidently tell her : ” I only check my email on Fridays.”

Months passed and I grew to like email. I even began to love email and to delight in hearing “You’ve Got Mail.” ( That was kinda goofy, huh?)

I was proud to feature my email address on my business card. I was hip. I was cool. I was modern. I sent several emails just for the heck of it to John Butler, of Butler, Shine and Stern in Sausalito. Once I told him a design was rejected and he got mad at me for using email….But I was happy becaude I knew how to use email!

I think one of the first people to send me emails regularly was Marty Rubino, the then publisher of the Marin Independent Journal. We would send emails reminding each other what time our golf tee time was and where we would meet for Sushi lunch.

One day a borderline cantakerous Senior Vp from corporate paid a visit to our shopping center. He came with the slightly less cantakerous VP of Development. I showed him some of my projects which I often would post on my wall. Marketing people like to post their projects on the wall. It’s kindof, sortof like putting photos or drawings on your refrigerator when you were a little dorky snot nosed kid.

I told our borderline cantankerous Senior VPs about how we are using email to communicate and that it makes our lives easier and more efficient. I told them how modern and relevant it was.

“Email?!!!” he bellowed.

That’s a big waste of time and not a productive way to do business.” – Pick up the phone and talk to people.”

He was not a fan of email. He actually seemed irritated. In fact, he strongly advised me to spend my time more wisely.

One uneventful month passed. I did not use or check email. Email was not a good thing. I was a team player and did as I was told.

That very summer, our company attended a large conference in San Diego California. It was sponsored by the International Council of Shopping Centers. We mingled with shopping center developers, IT people, Creative People and consultants from all over the world. It was a fabulous event. We attended seminars, luncheons and happy hours. We had delicious rubber chicken dinners served with soft carrots and green peas.

Guess what everyone was raving about at the conference ? Emails. Emails. Emails. We attended a two hour presentation on how to capitalize on email communications and how to use it to benefit our company. We were told to foster and nurture the use email because we are modern communicators. We were told to embrace email because it enables us to better promote our company’s brand. We were told to use email because all of the top brands in the world use email. My marketing agency headed by Leon Altman of Altman Communications concured and insisted that email and the internet are the future!

The aforementioned Senior VP who had admonished me came to me during a luncheon and looked at me quite sheepishly. He looked like he had devoured a volery of crows.

” I was wrong about email,” he said . ………….. ” We must embrace new forms of communications.”

Today we are in the year 2010. 17 years later. One and a half decades have come and gone. Times have changed dramatically. We no longer receive company memorandums on letterhead. Google’s, Sergey Bryn and the other really, really smart Russian guy are smarter than ever Billionaires. We conduct Google searches all day long, we Twitter, we check Gmail, we blog about things that mean something to us, we are online journalists even though we can’t write worth sh#!!!. We use Web 2.0 vehicles that include Linkedin, Google Adwords, Facebook and Utube.

Why do we use all of these new forms of communciation?

We use them because we are modern communicators. We embrace them because it enables us to better promote our company’s brand. We use them because all of the top brands in the world do: American Idol, CNN, Larry King, Mercedes Benz, Google, Armani, BMW, Barack Obama. And as he did in 1993, Leon Altman of Altman Communications concurs that these new communications tools are the future!

The Merchant Maven

Merchant Maven #1 in the World: Google Image Search

Posted in Best of the Merchant Maven: The Good, The Bad and the Irrelevant, How Do You Make The Credit Card Industry More Fun?, Search Engine Optimization, Some Fun Stuff on the Internet, The Maven Rambles On About Life, Uncategorized

The Merchant Maven is #1 in the ENTIRE GOOGLE WORLD for the image keywords “credit card machine.”

Go to Google and go to ‘Google Image search on top left”

Type in “credit card machine” The Merchant Maven is #1! Not bad out of 7,900,000 results, huh?

I’ve told a few people in my office and no one seems overly impressed. Why are they not impressed?

However, New York Based SEO expert Leon Altman said simply:” You don’t think being #1 out of almost 8,000,000 images helps your SEO? Absolutely it does!”

Below is the url to copy and paste or click on it.

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=credit+card+machine&gbv=2&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g1

“

Merchant Maven #1 image for keyword: Credit Card Terminal

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Some Fun Stuff on the Internet

Copy and paste this link:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=credit+card+terminal&gbv=2&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g1

Thank you to all my fans and supporters! I have achieved #1 status in world on an image Google search.

The Merchant Maven

Bad SEO Techniques and Sarah Palin: Hurt or Help Your Google Rankings

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Uncategorized

The Merchant Maven has been in existence for about eight months now. In the beginning, I was lucky if I received 3 or 4 unique visitors per day. This went on for about 5 months. When I submitted a press release about credit card processing, PCI Compliance or other news about the Credit Card Processing Industry, the number would go up to about 30 or so….

Then came my Sarah Palin story: It changed my SEO LIFE!

I reposted a story ( with an intro and gave credit, of course) I saw on the internet and added a photograph sent by a friend of mine who looks just like NFL quarterback Kurt Warner.

It’s a beautifully touched up photo of Sarah showing off a figure that any woman would envy. The title of the post is : Sarah Palin’s Sex Appeal: Hot Governor in Cold State:If you do a Google image search on “Sarah Palin” I am on the first page! She has received 15,000 visits already.

The unfortunate moral of the story, I reckon, is that if you put the word “sex” with a popular celebrity it enhances your website. I also think my site has been bombarded with “Automatic Blog posting”

I see many many comments on my blog that are either totally irrelevant to the subject matter or seem contrived somehow. Posts that talk about PCI Compliance, credit cards, credit card processing or Bank of America, Heartland, Chase Paymentech, Frontstream Payments, DTI, Direct technology Innovations, First Data or others seem to get contrived or silly remarks:

Some people write: ” Great Post or very well written blog” when it’s really not a great post and not particularly well written.

In other words, when people talk about how popular their site is or how many unique visitors they get………take it with a grain of salt! Or even a bucket of salt.

Below is a good articles by Julie Kent: It talks about some of the nonsense that goes on to improve SEO

The Merchant Maven

Bad SEO Techniques That Will Hurt Your Google Rankings

Julie Kent

Email Julie Kent

Julie Kent

06/6/08

What good is a site if no one can find it? That’s one of the basic premises behind search engine optimization, or as it is commonly called, SEO. Websites that rank higher in search engine results pages get far more hits than those sites buried several pages back. So ever since the dawn of search engines, clever webmasters have been tinkering away at finding the best ways to get their sites ranked higher, and in turn increase its traffic and visibility. It’s a race to the top, and as in any kind of competition there are things you can do to boost your chances of “winning”. Some, however, are more dangerous than others.

blackhat fish

There are some very basic things that everyone should do to their sites to optimize them to at least a bare minimum level. That would include such things as making sure you have meta tags for descriptions and keywords, different title tags for each page of your site, and alt tags for all images on your site. A sitemap will help spiders effectively crawl your site and better ensure that all pages are indexed properly, and a robots.txt file will help keep spiders out of places that you don’t want them going. Various redirects, such as 301 and 302 redirects, will help people and bots find moved or renamed pages on your site. These are amongst some of the most basic things that you can do to your site to begin optimizing it, and all of them are pretty safe and harmless.

As you begin to move onto more advanced SEO topics, you will undoubtedly uncover some techniques that sound like a good idea, but are really just dumb. Some of these techniques may be tempting to try, but are they worth it? What is the risk involved, and how easily will they get you banned from the likes of Google? What SEO techniques should you avoid?

Hidden Text

Hidden Text is a huge no-no. You as a human might not be able to see the white text on a white background, but you can bet that the bots can and you will get penalized for it. Think about it: bots are automated and they cannot “see” a page as we humans would, therefore they are reliant upon the source code of your site. Text that is the same color as the background sets off alarm bells. It’s not a clever way to stuff your site with extra keywords. It’s also something that you really want to watch out for. A site with less than adequate security can easily be exploited and injected with tons of spammy hidden text, so it’s a good thing to regularly check your logs and source code to be on the lookout for these things. Google doesn’t care if someone else did it to you – all they know is that it’s there, it’s bad, and you will punished for your ignorance.

Buying Links

This is a hotly debated topic. Is it or is it not alright to boost your rankings by purchasing links on high authority, high traffic, and high PageRank sites? Personally I think it’s alright. Google believes otherwise, and unofficial Google spokesman Matt Cutts has made an issue of it.

Putting aside the question of whether it is right or wrong, if it is something you choose to do, the stupidest thing that you could do would be to purchase a ton of links with the exact same anchor text. Did you just get 100 new links that all have the anchor text “blackhat fish”? If you did, shame on you. You just committed one of the cardinal sins of effective link buying.

If you’re going to go about buying links to your site, the key is to make it look as natural as possible, otherwise Google may slap you with a penalty. If you’re buying links purely for their link juice and not just for marketing and to get your name out, you want to make sure that none of these words appear near your newly purchased link: “sponsors”, “advertising”, “supporters”, and other similar words that might suggest your link was bought. This is why contextual linking within blog posts and articles has become so popular – it’s easy to sneak in a link, and if you throw in another link or two to some authority sites, it looks even more natural.

Instead of purchasing 100 “blackhat fish” links, why not try to mix it up a bit? Get a few “blackhat seo fish”, a few “blackhat fish”, and maybe even a couple “black-hat fish” or “black hat fish seo” links? Get the idea? Using similar anchor texts is alright, but using the SAME anchor texts will get you caught.

Never, ever buy a ton of links with the same text, and a lot of new links at all once might also raise some flags, so try to spread your efforts out over a period of time. Be patient, be smart, and don’t be stupid.

Cloaking

Cloaking is the practice of showing different content to the spiders that crawl your site than you show to your actual human users. Search engines don’t like it one bit, and no matter whether your intentions were pure or deceptive, they won’t care – you will be slapped with a penalty when they find out. You may even get banned and de-indexed, which really just defeats the purpose of doing SEO in the first place.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is another big no-no. Search engines only want to index original content, not the same thing 50 times. When duplicate content is detected, only one of them is likely to be indexed, and the others will probably end up in the dreaded supplemental index. These duplicate pages won’t rank.

On a similar note, doorway pages are also a very bad idea. These are pages designed specifically to draw search engine traffic to your site. How do you spot one? In general, if you can’t get to the page by following the site’s navigation, then it’s likely a doorway page. These pages serve no useful purpose than than attracting the attention of search engine users who will click the result, go to the site, and find that what they’re looking for is not on the page.

Link Exchanges

This was a popular technique in the early days of the web, and it’s not really effective today. The whole “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” thing doesn’t go over very well. It looks contrived, and it’s not natural. Link building should appear as natural as possible. Two-way link exchanges won’t get you banned, but it won’t help you any either. If you’re going to trade links, at least try to make sure it’s a three way thing. Never link to the same site that just linked to you. Instead, link to them from another site you own if you wish to return the favor.

Keyword Stuffing

On-page SEO is undoubtedly important, and some argue that on-page keywords have far more weight than those you stuff in your keyword meta tag. However, stuffing your site with an excessive number of keywords isn’t good, and delicate balance should be maintained. Sure, you want to rank for a specific keyword and the more times you use it on the page, the more likely you’ll rank for it. Just don’t go overboard. Try to keep your writing natural and use the keywords as you feel suitable. Using them too many times will make your site look spammy, which doesn’t sit well with either your actual human visitors or the spiders that crawl your site. It’s not likely to get you banned, but may in fact hurt your TrustRank, which is like your credibility and reputation with the automated bots.

Link Farms

Just say no to link farms. Link farms are sites whose only purpose is to artificially inflate link popularity through link exchanges. Google knows who they are, and if they’re not on their list yet, you can bet they will be soon. They’re considered “bad neighborhoods”, and will hurt your rankings. You may likely be penalized, and your site can even get banned for participating in these schemes. Avoid the problems, and don’t give into the temptation. An endorsement from a bad site is much more harmful than no endorsement at all.

Case Studies and Real-Life Examples

I can preach all day about bad SEO techniques and what could happen if you try them, but that might not be enough to convince everyone. So what better a way to show you the dangers of bad SEO than to share some real-life examples? Below are some example sites who’ve been bad, either in the present or in the past, that have felt the wrath of Big G.

The V7N SEO Blog:

These guys were recently slapped around by Google in a big way. Best known for its large webmaster forum, V7n also has a popular SEO blog which happens to have been hacked several months ago. Long after the problem was believed to have been resolved, Google banned them for some shady SEO.

Spammy text phrases were hidden all over in the V7n SEO blog, which in turn triggered Google’s spam bot detectors and got them banned from the index. This is the perfect example of how inadequate security on your site can lead to exploitation by a third-party, and consequently get you kicked out of Google. V7N admins claim that they were contacted by Google who said they would be temporarily removed from the index, not banned, but I’m going to go ahead and call bullshit on this one. Whatever the truth is, if V7N fixes the issues, begs for mercy, and files a reinclusion request, Google will likely let them back in. How long that will take though remains to be seen.

BMW Germany:

Think the big guys are immune to the effects of bad SEO? Think again! In 2006 Google infamously kicked the German BMW site (bmw.de) out of their index after they were caught using doorway pages. Tsk, tsk! This incident made international headlines, and BMW was quick to remove the offending pages, which were apparently live for a whole two years before being caught.

So what happened to bmw.de when they were served with the “Google Death Penalty”? Their PageRank tanked to an abysmal zero, and they no longer ranked at the top of the SERPS for their most important keywords. Ouch!

Other Low-Down, Dirty SEO Tactics

I have intentionally left out some other SEO tactics that many would consider shady or “blackhat SEO“. Some of these if not done properly can really hurt your site’s rankings and get you banned if you’re caught, while others you can use to effectively sabotage your competitors to move your own site up in the ranks. I will cover these another day in another post, in the very near future. Whether you think its morally wrong or not to engage in these tactics, it still exists, and these are techniques you should be aware of if at least to know when they’re being used on you.

36 Comments

MarketingDeviant says:

06/06/2008 at 2:31 pm

Nice tactics there. Three way linking sounds safer and better than two way linking. Cheating the system = Cheating yourself.

Mercy says:

06/06/2008 at 2:34 pm

Very well explained Julie! But I am afraid that i wont accept with you on Link Exchange. You have asked to link back from another site one own if at all the webmaster want to favour the link exchange method! But Whats the use in giving link back from Business related site for a jewellery related site. Rather, It would be better we exchange links from both similar theme sites(say, jewellery). Both the links would be an

useful resource for the users as well.

On the other hand the post is worth a sphinn!

mxyzplk says:

06/06/2008 at 3:29 pm

its really confusing me… I think everything that I do is almost listed there.

What should I do? I even dont have google rank yet.

Michelle says:

09/13/2009 at 9:10 pm

Hey there. check out my blog for an answer to your question about getting ranked in google. I have a free method and as well an effective low cost method. Hope that helps. Have a blessed day.

BlackHat says:

06/06/2008 at 4:42 pm

Well written post Julie, I especially like how you pointed out that a blackhat technique a lot are not familiar with, yet which is widely used, is attacking ones competitor, in an attempt to de-rank them, and have yours seem to rank higher naturally, when in truth it’s not. This is very shady and from what I have heard, is actually safe for your site, no way it can get banned unless you are fingered as the bad blackhat behind these sites being attacks!

Jignesh Padhiyar says:

06/07/2008 at 1:57 am

Thanks for Posting Such Nice Information

Firetown says:

06/07/2008 at 1:59 am

Anyone can come claim someone else did it to them. How would Google know and why should Google care? If it smells bad, flush it. Case closed!

Dan says:

06/07/2008 at 8:30 am

Great post and an important subject.

I wrote an article in my blog called “Banned from Google – what was the problem?”

Your article completes mine.

Great job

Dan

Wulffy says:

06/07/2008 at 12:22 pm

Got to hear that people write about it, Julie. But if you take a close look at the web in many niches, you only find those methods. If somebody earned money, much money, with those methods, a lot of people getting to know it and do the same. And if people have to earn money, they will follow.

The Google SERPs are so spammy and Google does not really fight against it. People buying domains from institutions that are closed with hundrets of links around the world and change the content totally and all of those links are still valid for Google. People writing articles and spam the web. In some niches you cannot search for good content, because all of the results are spammy. And so on, and so on.

Google will never win the fight, if they not speed up to speed of light.

Designer Diaper Dude says:

06/07/2008 at 1:45 pm

what exactly are link farms?

David says:

06/07/2008 at 1:51 pm

Not sure I agree about 3 way linking. That is an outright attempt to fool the ranking algorithm. Reciprocals may not help, but they are not blackhat either.

Firetown says:

06/07/2008 at 1:54 pm

I’m sure Google can detect 3 way linking, as they can detect too many incoming links from the same networks. Reciprocal and 3 way linking do help when done right, but one ways from many different sources help more.

James says:

06/08/2008 at 2:05 am

I know that duplicate content is an issue. The biggest issue for a site owner or a webmaster is to get the right page viewed, the page that you are trying to rank.

You pointed out that the search engines don’t want to index the same page 50 times. Rather than turn off features like print, or pdf views in CMS systems the content can exist, it just needs to be blocked through robots.txt.

Great post, thanks.

StarLink says:

06/08/2008 at 4:35 am

Interesting… Good to know these things. I have seen examples of all these tricks.

seofreak says:

06/08/2008 at 5:38 am

I do not see any real novelty in this post. Moreover, these are widespread tactics – and THEY WORK for a while. If and when they cause your rankings to slip in the serps is when a competitor reports the cheating or after a TIME google “decides” to push you out from the serps. You should point out that these techniques may boost your positions but it can be only TEMPORARY. I don’t think you should call them SEO techniques – only black hat workers (those who work for short time results) and webmasters that do not know much about illegal techniques use such methodes. TITLE spamming, keyword stuffing and bad neighbourhood are not mentioned here…

kugoo says:

06/08/2008 at 10:32 am

Exchange links will hurt your google rankings?

NO!

Craig Ritchie says:

06/08/2008 at 12:57 pm

Thanks Julie.

So often bloggers write How-to posts, but more often it’s the How-to-not posts that are more valuable to us. This is a great example. Several key nuggets that I will definitely be able to use in future web strategies.

jay paul says:

06/09/2008 at 2:14 am

@Julie : Why Most post of Peoples are not agree with this point:”Two-way link exchanges won’t get you banned, but it won’t help you any either”.

I have discussed with many users but peoples said, Link exchanges are not bad idea in SEO and will not hurt in our sites but i know about the Real SEO, Real SEO Persons will agree with this technique.

because they know about the link exchanges benifits and disadvantages , it will not much help you if you compare with one way links.

I want the Fact and Real answer of this point from your side so please share your comment about this point when ever you’ve minutes.

Thanks

Paul

SEO Solutions says:

06/09/2008 at 5:08 am

I like your Tip “Link Exchanges”

What you write about it make sense,because Google want natural Link Building and Link Exchange is not natural like buying Links,i think you are right about it.

Thank you.

Julie says:

06/09/2008 at 8:47 am

To clarify about link exchanges… I explicitly said it won’t hurt you, but it certainly won’t HELP you all that much. Google likes natural linking, and swapping links isn’t natural. They can easily detect that. Good SEO is about doing things that will boost your rankings. Two way link exchanges aren’t going to give you all that much help. One way links are the ideal links to acquire. But if you’ve agreed to give someone else a link in exchange for them giving you one, it would be better to give them a link from a site other than the one they just linked to, so long as it is relevant. Make sense?

And, as someone said… many of the things I listed are widely use. They may sometimes help you in the short term, but you will get caught eventually and then it will really hurt you. It’s not smart SEO to practice any of the techniques I listed.

Firetown says:

06/09/2008 at 9:11 am

What works best is link spreading .

Too many links within the same network is like inbreeding. Sure, you can produce babies that way, but they will not turn out all that smart.

seo4success says:

06/09/2008 at 9:53 am

Interesting! Thank you Julie for your clarifications on link exchange!

Kevin Gamache says:

06/09/2008 at 10:57 am

@Firetown – That is the best analogy I have ever heard for in network linking!

Michael Martinez says:

06/09/2008 at 3:52 pm

There is no documented correlation between duplicate content and Google’s Supplemental Results Index (which should not be confused with the other search engines’ secondary indexes).

You can find plenty of duplicate content in Google’s Main Web Index. They don’t really care if they index duplicate content as long as their users don’t complain, and in many queries users often find duplicate content to be acceptable.

News and ecommerce queries often have duplicate content in them.

Wulffy says:

06/09/2008 at 3:58 pm

Michael, I can confirm that. You are completely right beside of that Google is able to filter out DC in some cases. Try to make two domains with same content and wait. Some day one of those will disappear from the SERPs. Without any complaint from users.

jeff says:

06/09/2008 at 4:38 pm

Duplicate Content

how does this affect site’s that aggregate news? like Newser.com, for example….

WebSite Design Orange County says:

06/14/2008 at 12:50 pm

Not too sure I agree with you regarding the link exchange situation. If you pour over your analytics you will see where Google give you credit for back links and where they don’t. I bet you are getting credit for sites you have two way link exchanges with, thus proving that Google does in fact give you credit for these.

And to further illustrate how Google doesn’t rate all links as being equal, check your stats to see if you are getting any juice from one way link backs. I’m sure there are some quality sites that give you a one way link back that for whatever reason Google doesn’t give you credit for. Why? Who knows.

But I would automatically say that three way linking is better or worse than two or even one way link backs. You simply cannot open the Google algorithm and point to proof.

Totonet says:

07/04/2008 at 12:59 am

Great tutorial. I also cant undertand the meaning of

link farms??

Mike Dammann says:

07/04/2008 at 12:04 pm

in case of doubt check wiki http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm

EGCG says:

07/05/2008 at 11:37 am

Was it the reason v7n finally decided to sell whole v7n network at very cheap price ($220,000)?

Mike Dammann says:

07/05/2008 at 1:17 pm

the owner woke up one morning and looked at the good morning thread and wanted people to forget who started it all. He actually offered someone $220k to take it from him and the sitepoint mods accidentally turned it into an auction. He got lucky.

Water Fuel Cells says:

07/07/2008 at 11:20 am

Water Fuel Cells

Water For Gas says:

07/07/2008 at 11:21 am

I use this free website to get indexed quickly and it doesn’t cost you a dime…

Water For Gas

Dan SPielman says:

07/15/2008 at 3:50 am

Is too many TAGS in your blog posts a way to derank in google?

Scott says:

08/10/2008 at 3:01 am

My question is the same as Dan’s (last poster before me)

I have a few Wordpress blogs and one of my first blogs I noticed quite a few “tag” pages being indexed in Google. Naively I thought this was cool, more pages = more visitors. Shortly after these tag pages were indexed I got, and still don’t have, many Google visitors.

Oddly enough, I don’t see any tag pages in Y/MSN. I just recently added in my robots file Disallow: /tag/

Even though pages have already been indexed, will Google DE-INDEX these pages and help my site do you think? Or is it too late?

It’s hard to find info on Dupe Content when it comes to tags