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Google Webmaster Tools Will Now Report Duplicate Content Found Across Multiple Domains

Amit Banerjee — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 04:12:06 +0000

Duplicate content is nothing but shadow copies of the same written piece accessible through multiple URL’s. In general, duplicate content issues can be divided into two broad groups:

The webmaster himself copies content from different sources and uses the duplicate content on his website. This is called content scraping or online plagiarism, which is completely blindfold in nature.
Technical issues regarding permalinks, theme, design and architecture of a site can also contribute towards duplicate content.

The first scenario can never be solved.

Content scrapers, aggregators and spammers will continue to scrap content from legitimate sources and pollute the web with auto created junk. However, the second scenario is under your control and there are ways to make sure your site does not have duplicate content issues due to technical glitches.

What do search engines do when they find duplicate content on a website?

When Googlebot detects the same content across multiple domains or web addresses, their algorithms determines the “cluster of content” and pick a representative URL to show in search results. Let’s take an example to understand the scenario.

Let’s say you wrote a blog post at example.com and someone copied the same content at xyz.com and abc.com. Google will crawl all the three pages from three different domains but it will index only one of the three sources.

Which source will get indexed first?

Noone knows but Google says that their algorithms do a reasonably good job in detecting the original source. When Google has processed the cluster of pages containing the same content, it will return only one URL in search results. All the other URL’s will never be shown on search results and they will be considered as duplicate content or shadow copies.

If your website has a substantial amount of duplicate content and Google continues to find duplicate content across different pages over a given period of time, your website will be penalized and might be completely removed from Google’s index.

Duplicate Content Reporting In Google Webmaster Tools

The good news is that Google will now report duplicate content issues within your Google webmaster tools dashboard. When Google detects duplicate content across several pages on your domain and chooses a representative URL on an external site, this situation is called “cross domain URL selection”.

What this means is that the content on your site is considered a duplicate copy of the content that is selected to be shown on search results.

Let us take an example to completely understand cross domain URL selection.

You wrote a blog post at abc.com but someone copied the entire article and published it on his aggregation channel at xyz.com. Due to varied circumstances, the page at xyz.com got indexed before Google indexed your page.

If the page at xyz.com is shown on search results and you don’t see your page indexed at all, be rest assured the page at xyz.com is considered a representative URL and your page has been flagged for duplicate content. In some situations, the spam site may rank higher

In the following video, Google Engineer Matt Cutts admits that search engines can sometimes be clueless in determining the original content curator and there is a thin chance that a shallow copy of your content might get indexed faster.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LsB19wTt0Q

Duplicate content reporting in Google Webmaster tools is available in the message center. It will show up only when Google finds duplicate content on your website. This is a great way to find out why some pages on your site are not showing up on Google.

If someone is ripping off your content and you see that Google and other search engines are indexing the spam source, here are a few ways you can tell Google that you are the original content curator:

Go to whoishostingthis.com, find the web hosting provider of the spam site and file a DMCA complaint with the hosting provider.
If the spam site is using Google Adsense to monetize his website, file a legal DMCA complaint using the Google Adsense DMCA complaint form.
Login to your Google Webmaster tools account and submit a spam report.

Prevent Duplicate Content Issues On Your Website

As a responsible webmaster, you should ensure that your domain is free from technical glitches which may contribute towards duplicate content issues within your site.

Here are some tips and best practices for avoiding duplicate content within a single domain or across multiple TLD’s:

1. Use URL Canonicalization: Use the rel=”canonical” element within the section of your page to point to the original base URL, which you want Google to index and show in search results. If the same content is accessible through multiple URL’s and you don’t want to delete the shadow copies, the rel=canonical element is often the best way to tell search engines that these pages are just a copy and should not be indexed.

Learn more about managing multilingual content across one domain or several TLD’s. In the following video, Google Engineer Matt Cutts tells how to deal with same content posted across multiple top level domains:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

Note: Search engines reserve the right to ignore your canonicalization rules under severe circumstances and return the best suited match to the user. Algortihms!

2. 301 redirect: A 301 redirect is the best way to tell search engines that this page has moved or merged with this new page. If you find that several pages on your site have the same content, do a permanent 301 redirect from the old pages to the new page which you want Google to show in search results.

3. Permalinks: If you are using WordPress or another CMS to manage the content of your blog, check the structure of your URL. There are so many situations when your permalinks and post slugs may contribute towards duplicate content.

4. Check your Archive pages: Most content management systems e.g WordPress have category, tag, date, author and other archive pages which might show the entire post content on the archive page. This is not a good practice and you should ensure that the archive pages show only a portion of the content. Tip: use the_excerpt() instead of the_content()

5. Using Robots.txt: There can be situations when you might have to permanently block duplicate pages using a Robots.txt file. This is not full proof because if someone links to the duplicate page, Goglebot will crawl that link and find that duplicate page sooner or later. The solution ideal here is to use the rel=”canonical” element or do a 301 redirect to the original page.

6. Cross domain rel=canonical is a good idea: If you have multiple domains which has essentially the exact same content across multiple pages, it makes perfect sense to do cross domain rel canonicals. Google and other search engines support cross domain rel canonicals and this is just a secondary alternative of 301 redirects.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI6L2N4A0hA

7. Using a Mobile optimized Theme? Are you using a mobile optimized theme for your website? Make sure the mobile optimized theme isn’t causing “cloaked” pages or creating duplicate content issues.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY9h3G8Lv4k

It is absolutely fine to use a different URL structure for the mobile version of your site but you should always implement the rel=canonical attribute and point back to the page which should be indexed.

My advice here is to not let Google index the mobile website at all. Let Google index your main website only, you can always detect the user agent of the user’s browser and fetch him the mobile version yourself.

Got tips or suggestions? Let’s hear them in the comments.

Google Webmaster Tools Will Now Report Duplicate Content Found Across Multiple Domains originally published on Ampercent

Adding Authorship Markup On Your Website Using Special Anchors And URL Parameters

Amit Banerjee — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:16:11 +0000

You might know that Google has recently launched an authorship markup tag which attempts to recognize original authors writing a piece of content. By using authorship markup on your blog, you can tell Google that you are the original author who has written this content. This helps cut the clutter from spammers, auto posters and scrap sites who blindly copy content from your site without any attribution as such.

Google is becoming very serious in their attempt to identify original authors and people who have trust and expertise. If Google thinks that your are a reputed person in your industry, your thumbnail image will be shown in search result pages. An example is shown below:

This is a win-win situation for both users and Google. After seeing the author thumbnail, users will consider your page as trustworthy and they are most likely to click that link and land into your page, looking for the answer they are looking for. Google wins, because their users can quickly find the best content.

Adding authorship markup across all the pages of your site is fairly easy. I have detailed all the steps in my previous tutorial here – Adding authorship markup rel=”author” in WordPress. Here is the pictorial representation of how the rel=”author” markup tag should be implemented on your website.

When you Can’t Edit Your Website’s Template – Add Authorship markup Using URL Parameters

In order to apply the correct syntax for Authorship markup, you have to modify some parts of your site’s HTML code and add the desired rel=”author” and rel=”me” tags.

Now, how do you implement authorship markup on a site where you don’t have the permission to edit or modify the HTML template? What if your site is on a free blogging platform e.g Tumblr, Posterous, Google Sites – where you don’t have enough options to modify the HTML and add the desired author tags?

Luckily, Google has an alternative way to help you out. Here is what you have to do:

1. Open your Google Plus profile and copy your profile URL.

2. When you are publishing a new page on your site, use the following code at the bottom of your page

+Your Google Profile Name

3. This is important.

You must use the + before your Google profile name because this syntax tells Google that this anchor text points to the Google profile of the person and it is not linked accidentally or unintentionally.

4. If you don’t have enough permissions to edit the HTML source of your blog post, you can always write your name in plain text and add the rel=”author” URL parameter using the “Link” button on your site’s text editor.

5. One last step. Complete this form and let Google know that you are using URL parameters for author markup on your site.

The full markup is more bulletproof and recommended for users who can edit the HTML template of their sites. Do not use this alternative method, thinking that both of them are equally feasible. However, if you can’t implement the full markup, this is the only workaround to have authorship markup support on your site using special anchors and URL parameters.

Watch the following video where Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson talk about Authorship markup for sites who can’t edit the HTML source of their template.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3Oh7Ues8A

Adding Authorship Markup On Your Website Using Special Anchors And URL Parameters originally published on Ampercent

Improve The Indexing Of Your Website’s Recently Updated Pages Using Fetch As GoogleBot In Google Webmaster Tools

Amit Banerjee — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 21:05:37 +0000

Google has a lot of different ways to discover content on the web.

Googlebot (Google’s web spider) crawls billions of websites on a regular basis to crawl and chew textual content, images, videos and other document formats (e.g PDF, DOC) embedded in websites. This process can be extremely fast for popular sites who post a lot of unique content on a regular basis. Big media publications are indexed within 10 seconds while crawling a new story on this blog takes around a minute or so.

But how do you make sure Google’s crawler indexes your site’s recently updated pages in a matter of few seconds? How do you tell Google that there are a few pages on your site which needs immediate crawling and deeper indexing?

Google maintains a public page where anyone can request their site URL’s to be crawled and indexed. This page was built quite a while ago and it’s no longer considered a viable way to get your pages crawled and indexed faster.

The good news is that Google has recently introduced a better and faster way to index your website’s internal and recently updated pages. If you have a Google Webmasters tools account, you can fetch the pages and tell Google that these pages need immediate crawling.

Let Google Crawl Your Important Pages Really Fast

Login to your Google Webmasters tools account and go to the “Fetch as Googlebot” page. Add the page of your site which you want Google to index and click “Fetch”. When Google has successfully fetched the given page, you will see a link to submit that page in Google’s index

After submitting the URL to Google’s index, you have two options

1. Tell Google to index only this page
2. Tell Google to index this page and all the pages that are linked from the current page.

Here is the option which will be shown:

Generally, I would go with the first option but in case you have severely changed your site’s structure, you should go ahead and choose the “URL and all linked pages” option.

Google does not guarantee that they will index your pages and process all the requests right away. However, this method can improve the indexing of older pages which have been updated recently. You can test this feature with pages that have no backlinks and takes a long time to get crawled, normally.

When You Should Use The Fetch As GoogleBot Feature In Google Webmaster Tools?

There are a couple of situations when the fetch as Googlebot feature in Google webmaster tools can come in handy. Some examples:

1. You are live blogging an event and breaking a news story on a media event. Chances are that your competitor sites are also writing about the same story at that very moment, so it is important to get your page indexed faster and as early as possible.

2. You are running a contest on your site and the content of a page is changing every hour because of user generated content being added and deleted by moderators. If you want Google to rank your page for relevant queries, requesting a fresh crawl of that page can help.

3. Your site is fairly new and it has no backlinks. You want Google to crawl your site as fast as possible because you want to rank for some keywords which are time critical in nature.

4. You have added a few pages to a directory of your site which was previously disallowed using the robots.txt file. This directory is fairly deeper within your site’s architecture and you want to ping Googlebot and say “hey, here are a few pages on my site which is placed on a very deep level directory. Please crawl and index it, if you will”.

Please note that using Google’s fetch as Googlebot feature is not mandatory and should be done sparingly. Don’t go around and start fetching each and every page of your site, this wont help as far as indexing or rankings are concerned. You should use this feature only when a few pages require urgent indexing and better crawling.

If you are having issues with slow crawling, I highly recommend fixing the crawl errors first and ensure your content is crawlable. Fetching the page in Google Webmaster tools wont help repetitive crawling, if you have blocked the page using a robots.txt file or using a meta noindex tag in the head section.

Improve the Crawling And Indexing Of Your Website: Some Tips You Should Consider

If you want to improve the crawl rate of your website and ensure that your pages are indexed faster, here are a few tips you should know;

1. Create a Google Webmaster tools account and add your site to Google webmaster tools. Routinely monitor your Google webmaster tools account for crawl errors, site specific issues and redirections. Fix them as early as possible.

2. Create an XML sitemap of your website and submit it on your Google webmaster tools account. If possible, create a separate sitemap for Google news, videos and a different sitemap for images.

3. If your website does not offer an RSS feed, create one. Google uses RSS feeds for discovering new and fresh pages of your website.

4. Whenever you create a new page or publish a new blog post, tweet a link of the page on your Twitter account. If that page gets a fair amount of retweets, Google will notice it.

5. Use Pubsubhubbub on your site. It’s an asynchronous way to tell Google when you have new content waiting to be crawled and indexed.

6. Produce content on a daily basis. Google loves sources who produce original and interesting content daily.

7. Check your Robots.txt file and your meta tags used in the head section. Have you blocked specific pages of your site from getting crawled? Did you by mistake added a noindex,follow tag on any of the page?

8. Add a link of the new page to the homepage of your site. In general, the homepage of a site gets the maximum PageRank and link juice from external sites, so Google will frequently visit your homepage multiple times a day.

9. If you get a backlink to the page, it will be crawled right away. But be careful with this approach, don’t start spamming forums and blog directories to get backlinks for every other page of your site. This approach won’t help but hurt you in the longer run.

If you ask me, I would leave it up to Google to index the content of newer pages on this site. I would check the technical aspects and architecture of my site and won’t obsess about how frequently Google crawls the newer pages or recently updated posts of this blog.

Turns out they do a really fine job, this page got indexed within 1 minute.

Improve The Indexing Of Your Website’s Recently Updated Pages Using Fetch As GoogleBot In Google Webmaster Tools originally published on Ampercent

WordPress Tip – Find All Pages of Your Site Which Don’t Have a Meta Description or Title Tag

Amit Banerjee — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 14:04:48 +0000

Title tags and meta description are two HTML elements which play a huge role in determining the success of a website, as far as search engine optimization is concerned.

Search engines display your optimized title tag and a short description snippet on search result pages, so its very important to ensure that every page on your site has a unique title tag and has a small meta description element added to it. While there are situations when you can safey ignore the Meta description tag, but ignoring the meta information on a large number pages can be a big mistake.

Why? Because when a lot of your website’s pages have missing meta description and title tags, search engines might not show them on search result pages for similar queries.

For example: If one page of your site is about “Blue widgets” and there is no title tag or a description snippet on the page, search engines might show a portion of text as meta description which not be ideally optimized. Someone searching for “Blue widgets for an ecommerce site” might not click your site’s link from search results, as the description snippet and the title tag do not have the keywords in them.

Dealing With Missing Meta Description And Title Tags

So what should you do with internal pages which do not have a meta description or title tag? Should you use a script or a plugin which will automatically generate the description and Title tag for you? I would suggest NO.

If you are using some script to auto generate meta descriptions for all pages, there is a high chance that those description and title tags won’t be “humanly optimized”. Machine generated stuff work out of the box but the disadvantage is that they are not very effective, when you are dealing with human eyes on search result pages.

In most cases, the plugin will use the first few paragraphs as meta description and the

heading of the page as the Title tag. This may work but in general, the title tag and the meta description should be added manually, depending upon the phrases and keywords for which you want the page to rank on search result pages.

Find All Pages Which Do Not Have a Meta Description or a Title Tag

Previously, I was using the All In One SEO pack plugin for filling up meta description and title tags for individual posts. The plugin is very useful but the downside here is that there is no easy way to find pages that do not have a meta description or a title tag.

The solution here is to install the missing seo data WordPress plugin. This plugin lets you find out all the pages on your site which do not have a meta description tag or a unique title tag embedded within the page source.

Once you have installed the plugin, go to the options page and you will be able to filter all the pages whose meta description and title meta tags are empty. I ran the test on this site and found that there are more than 200 blog posts where I haven’t filled the SEO details earlier.

Note: The plugin will automatically detect which plugin is being used to show meta description and title tags on all pages of your site. If you’re not using any plugin and using a custom field for meta tags, I am not very sure whether the plugin can detect meta tags using the custom field information.

There is no way to filter posts by only a specific meta tag, however the plugin is useful and saves you a good amount of time from manually finding the pages who have missing SEO details.

Related: More WordPress tips and tutorials.

WordPress Tip – Find All Pages of Your Site Which Don’t Have a Meta Description or Title Tag originally published on Ampercent

Look Deeply Into The Robots.Txt File Of Blogspot Blogs

Amit Banerjee — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:20:53 +0000

A robots.txt file is placed on the root directory of a website and it’s purpose is to block web crawlers and search engines from spidering specific directories or pages of your website. Using a robots.txt file, a webmaster can specify which directories are accessible and which directories should be spidered by a search bot.

When a search bot enter a website, they must abide by the generic robots.txt protocol and if you have manually blocked a specific page or a directory of your website from the robots.txt file, the search bots should ignore that directory completely. [More information on using robots.txt on your website]

Unlike self hosted websites, blogs that are hosted at Blogger.com do not have any control on their Robots.txt file. This is because all the files, images and the entire site architecture is owned by Google. The webmaster of a Blogger blog can only produce or edit the content. There is scope for changing themes, modifying designs, adding widgets but when it comes to complete control of a website, Blogger blogs still have limited access.

Here is how the robots.txt file of a blogger blog looks like:

From the above screenshot, it is clear that all the search engines are blocked to crawl through the “search” directory of all blogs that are hosted on the blogger platform.

But the results speak a different story.

Search Engines Can Crawl And Index The Search Result Pages Of BlogSpot blogs

If you combine the site operator and the inurl operator for search result pages of BlogSpot blogs, you will be surprised to see that Google has crawled thousands of search result pages of BlogSpot blogs. Although the entire search directory is completely blocked from the robots.txt file, but it looks like the search engines can bypass or override it, which in itself is highly contradictory.

Here are some example results:

1. Search for site:*.blogspot.com inurl:search?updated-max on Google and you will see the following result:

It’s interesting to note that Google has crawled and stored all the search result pages from random BlogSpot blogs to it’s index. In some cases, pages that are redirecting to a different domain or to a different section of the site have also been indexed (see the redirecting header on the title of the page).

What’s The Point In Indexing Search Result Pages?

The correct way to disallow an entire directory and ensure that the content of the directory is not crawled by any search bot is to use the following code:

User agent: *
Disallow: /directory/

Note the trailing slash at the end of the directory name.

This trailing slash tells the search bots that this is a directory and not any other page or file on the website. Now let’s go back to the robots.txt file of a typical BlogSpot blog

Hence, in order to completely block all search bots from indexing dynamically generated pages of a Blogger blog, there should be a trailing slash at the end of Disallow: /search i.e it should be Disallow: /search/

I am not sure what is the reason of this anomaly and why the robots.txt file of all Blogger blogs are not configured that way. What surprises me even more is that Google has crawled and indexed tens of thousands of dynamic search result pages of BlogSpot blogs. These pages are not very useful when compared to the single post pages of a BlogSpot blog.

Not to forget the fact that Google itself has high standards on what should be crawled and what shouldn’t be.

What’s up Google? You told us to focus on high quality content and remove junk posts and pages that don’t offer value to users. Then why is the fact that your own blogging platform’s robots.txt file is not working properly and indexing tons of thousands of dynamically generated search result pages of Blogger blogs.

And what should the owner of a Blogger blog do, in order to get these search result pages removed from your index? They can’t control the Robots.txt of a BlogSpot blog and there is no way to add “Noindex” meta tag to these machine generated search result pages.

Thoughts?

Look Deeply Into The Robots.Txt File Of Blogspot Blogs originally published on Ampercent

YouTube Launches Social Pages For Websites, And Here Is Your Guide For Optimizing Video Content For Search Engines

Amit Banerjee — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 10:59:03 +0000

YouTube has again added another major upgrade – introducing “As seen on” pages which contains a summary of videos embedded by a particular website or blog. (see example)

The largest video sharing site has been busy pushing updates one after another. The other day they introduced a new way to embed YouTube videos without the logo, while we have already discussed how YouTube plans to use it’s artist page to organize music videos from a particular singer or band.

But unlike these updates and feature enhancements, the most recent one is superbly beneficial for blogs and websites who have a lot of embedded video content.

YouTube’s “As Seen On” Page For A Website – Find All Videos Embedded Within A Site

YouTube is currently crawling videos from blogs, websites, forums and other online sources who have embedded online videos on their sites. If YouTube finds useful content on your website where a video is embedded, your website will have a special “As seen on YouTube” page. The videos will be listed in the order YouTube bots discover them and your blog post will also be featured on YouTube.

Here is how the social blog page of this site looks on YouTube:

This is indeed a nice way to earn free authority backlinks to your website and promote your content on other platforms. Since the YouTube social page for your website is publicly accessible and not stored behind a login, the search bots will easily crawl it which means you will enjoy some extra SEO benefits.

The Takeaway lesson: Embed videos on your blog posts, whenever necessary, possible and meaningful.

On YouTube’s social page for a website, two options are provided.

You can either hit the “Play All” button to see all the popular videos embedded on a website, or click the “Add to Playlist” button and add selected videos to one of your playlists. This is a nice way to discover video content from popular tech and news sites who produce a lot of content on a regular basis. If in case you have missed some earlier video screencasts produced on a particular website, you can head straight to the website’s social page on YouTube and find that specific video you are looking for.

The icing on the cake is done on the actual video page which will contain a link to your social page, so other visitors who are watching that same video on YouTube can find more videos from your site. Here is an example I found:

Some Tips For Video SEO: Optimizing Your Site For Video Search Results

Here are some tips on doing search engine optimization for online videos and how you can ensure that search engines and video syndicating websites can find embedded videos on your blog:

1. Create a video sitemap for your website or blog (see example). WordPress blogs can make use of this excellent video sitemap WordPress plugin. (read: different ways to create XML sitemaps)

2. List all the videos on this sitemap.xml file and make sure that each entry has a custom title and description, apart from the video content that is present on your website.

3. Have a lot of textual content on the page where the video is embedded. The search bots can never crawl or “see through” flash, so it is necessary on your part to describe what the video is all about.

Text, Text, Text, never say – watch this video !

4. The more useful textual content you add, the more it will help the search engines and human visitors to discover your video from search engine result pages.

5. Always provide the due credit and link back to the video sharing website which is hosting the video. Don’t just link to the homepage, always link back to that page where the video is accessible.

Why? Because when providing the proper attribution for the source, you are actually helping the search bots discover new and useful content which will eventually help in the rankings of your own website in video search results.

6. Google universal search is a bonus source for traffic and helps in generating the buzz. Add your video sitemap to Google webmaster tools, Bing webmaster tools and Yahoo site explorer so that the search engines get an index of all videos that are present on your site.

7. If you do a lot of screencasts or video tutorials, it is a good idea to have a dedicated YouTube channel for your blog and upload your screencasts to this channel. This not only helps in branding but also gives you some boost when loyal readers and search engines find you through the links that are present in the description snippet of the video.

8. Consider registering for a .tv domain name and host all the videos produced by your company in this domain. Some nice examples are: Techcrunch.tv and Webbeat.tv. Though TechCrunch operates as a tech blog on the .com domain, their video content is also separately available on the .tv domain. This helps the search engines and the human readers discover videos from TechCrunch in fewer clicks.

9. Avoid Ajax, JavaScript and fancy stuff for decorating your video page layout. Nothing beats proper plain HTML when it comes to easier crawling and indexing of videos by search bots.

10. Ensure that your video pages are prominently placed within your site’s architecture.

11. It’s always a good idea to provide a separate feed for your video screencasts.

12. Use embedded players and don’t place the videos in pop-ups. It is a general rule of the web that readers don’t ever interact with that ugly looking pop up window.

13. Run a video sharing forum where it is not always possible to add textual content or custom descriptions to the video? Add a really big comment box and encourage site visitors to comment and rate the videos. These comments will provide some description on what the video is all about.

14. Don’t embed the same video on dozens of pages thinking that it will help in video seo. It won’t.

Instead, create a single page to hold the video and link to it from contextually related articles, navigation and other important areas of your site.

15. Use YouTube’s excellent Insights feature to find which of you videos are already popular. Then try creating related and meaningful video content to serve your existing audience. If you serve your loyal readers well, they will spread the word which in turn might bring more links and increased readership.

16. Do some social media promotion like tweeting your videos or sharing them on Facebook. This will attract people to visit your blog and see your videos in the first place. Self promotion is necessary and remember the fact that no one else is going to do it for you.

17. Last but not the least: Place the video higher up on the page, search bots can easily crawl stuff that are present on top of the HTML source.

Video Is the Next “big thing”, so you should devote some time and optimize your site for video search results. I also recommend reading these excellent video seo guides from Yoast, Drew Hubbard and Lisa Barone

And here are a couple of videos where Google engineer Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin talk about the factors that influence the ranking of videos on search result pages:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxjRjt5pPys

YouTube Launches Social Pages For Websites, And Here Is Your Guide For Optimizing Video Content For Search Engines originally published on Ampercent

WordPress Image Attachment Pages Can Sometimes Hurt Your Site’s SEO

Amit Banerjee — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 11:08:45 +0000

If you have a blog powered by the WordPress blogging platform, read this.

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platform and content management systems, which powers millions of blogs and websites. If you have a web server and want to start your own self hosted blog, nothing is as easy and as customizable as WordPress is.

Barring the great features of WordPress, there are some flaws or holes in how WordPress generates the different pages of your site. And a webmaster should be very careful in dealing with the unnecessary machine generated pages on his/her blog.

WordPress Image Attachment Pages

Whenever you write a new blog post and attach an image within the WordPress post editor, the image is uploaded to the default image directory of your WordPress installation. Let’s say you have installed WordPress in a custom directory of your website e.g www.domain.com/files/ but using the web address as www.domain.com.

When you upload a new image to one of your blog posts, the image will be stored under www.domain.com/files/wp-content/uploads by default. You can however define a custom directory or subdomain for images and call the image from the FTP server using “Add Image from URL” .But in case you’re using the earlier option (i.e uploading images from the WordPress post editor), it might actually hurt your site’s visibility in the eyes of the search engine.

This is because whenever you upload an image from the WYSIWYG post editor, WordPress creates a separate image attachment page. The image attachment page will hold only the image of the post with practically no content in it.

Let’s say one of your blog posts whose URL is http://domain.com/hello-world/ has an image with the file name of welcome.png. When you publish that article, the URL of your blog post will be http://domain.com/hello-world/1/ (this depends upon the permalink structure of your site).

Additionally, a new page will also be created which will contain only the image e.g http://domain.com/hello-world/welcome/. The following demonstration will clear the idea

Now here are some problems with WordPress image attachment pages.

1. If you add 5 images to one blog post, WordPress will create 6 URL’s after you hit the “Publish” button. One URL will be that of the original article, while 5 other URL’s will be generated for all those images contained in the blog post.

2. Checking the source code for WordPress image attachment pages, you will find that all of them do not contain the “NoIndex” meta tag. Which means, the search bots can discover and index those useless Image attachment pages.

3. SEO plugins like All In One SEO Pack have the ability to enter the canonical URL of a page within the source but surprisingly, the canonical URL generated for each image attachment page is not the actual URL of your blog post. It is the same URL of the image attachment page, as shown in the following screenshot

How The Image Attachment Page Of WordPress Might Hurt Your Site

Google has recently tightened it’s grips on spam sites who plagiarize content from genuine sources or do not produce original content on their own. The current buzz word is “Content farm” and if your site has a lot of unnecessary pages with practically no content in them – your site might be accidentally sending “Content farm signals” to the Googlebot.

Furthermore, linking to images from the actual post will allow the Googlebot to crawl those attachment pages and will dilute the Google juice flowing through the actual content pages. If you populate Google’s web index with “content-less” pages, your site may get flagged as a content mill.

Recently, while checking through the error reports of Google webmaster tools, I found that a lot of these image attachment pages were indexed. Checking through the source code of these image attachment pages, I found that they are not Noindexed.

This is a serious SEO blunder !

How To Prevent Indexing of WordPress Image Attachment Pages

There are two ways to prevent the crawling of useless image attachment pages, generated by WordPress.

Either, add a “Noindex,Follow” meta tag to all image attachment pages. You will need to edit the attachment.php or single.php file of your theme and add the meta tag manually.

A much simpler option is to use the Robots Meta WordPress plugin. This is by far one of the best WordPress plugin to Noindex the unnecessary pages of your site e.g tag, category, date, author etc. Once you have installed the plugin, open the plugin options and you will see an entry as “Redirect attachment URL’s to parent Post URL”

Once you have enabled that selection, all the image attachment pages of WordPress will redirect to their original post pages. The redirect in place will be a 301 permanent redirect which will pass on the message to the Googlebot “This page has permanently moved to this new location”

Once you are sure that all the attachment pages are properly redirecting to their individual post URL’s, login to your Google webmaster tool reports and use the URL removal tool to remove all the previously crawled image URL’s of your site.

301 redirecting useless pages to their actual content is a good practice – this helps the search engines discover the actual content on your site without letting them divert across an enormus cloud of useless, junk pages.

Also read: Prevent hotlinking of your site’s images and save bandwidth

WordPress Image Attachment Pages Can Sometimes Hurt Your Site’s SEO originally published on Ampercent

SEO Misconceptions You Should Avoid

Amit Banerjee — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:30:43 +0000

When I started writing this blog two years back, I had no idea how a search engine works. I had no idea what is pagerank, what the heck is link building and why people always crave for links, anchor text and rankings. I just wrote the articles one after another.

Overtime, I learned a thing or two about search marketing and how someone should optimize his blog or website or even optimize a LinkedIn profile for search engines. For the targeted search traffic, to be more precise.

If you’re someone who is starting out today, have written a couple of blog posts and wonder how your website is going to gets the ranks, here are some common SEO mistakes or misconceptions you should avoid.

It Will Take Some time

It’s not going to happen the moment you publish your first blog post. It doesn’t matter who you are, the search engines would keep an eye on your blog for at least 6 months until you can expect some positive results, as far as the rankings are concerned.

Having an already established blog helps you to direct readers (and the bots) to your new venture, spread the word and engage. But it’s nearly impossible for anyone to rank for a particular keyword with only 13 blog posts and a 20 day old site.

I didn’t fall a prey for this, because I never bothered about rankings for the first year or so. I just wrote 2-3 posts every week, most of them make no sense these days.

Of course, you can comment spam on thousands of blogs, install the Alexa toolbar and get a handsome Alexa ranking for sure. But it hardly matters, trust me.

“Negative Feedback” == Linkbait

A lot of people think that if they provide negative feedback or start a personal commentary with the sole aim of ”Criticism” or “Being Loud”, they will attract more links. Some call it Customer Anger as LinkBait.

Here is an example.You start a web hosting company but never provide support to your clients (intentionally). The idea is that your customers will complain about your product on Customer complain sites, which will attract more back links. The more bad you treat them, the more links you get and the higher goes your rankings, your sales pitch or whatever you’re up against.

This is of course not a good idea for two reasons.

First, you are responsible for your company’s reputation. It doesn’t matter whether you or someone else is abusing your product – your existing and would be customers will “pull out” the moment they start hearing bad things about you. It doesn’t matter how many Twitter followers or Faebook fans or search visitors you have, if your product doesn’t offer “value”, every other effort will fail.

Second, most of the customer complaint and feedback forums automatically use “rel=nofollow” for links, so getting a thousand backlinks from Customer complain sites will be utterly useless. Read Getsatisfaction.com’s explanation article – When Businesses attack customers

The result: The huge army of links from customer complaint sites neither flow Pagerank or anchor text and hence have no effect on how your website is ranked on search engines.

SEO is only about the Links

“I will need a lot of backlinks to my article for the rankings to work. Content can be developed later”

This is a crazy idea which must be avoided at all costs. How can you expect someone else to link to you, if your content doesn’t offer value ? Websites don’t link to websites, it’s the people who recommend other peoples work or research or voice.

So try to make sure your site has useful content, good architecture, Google Friendly skeleton apart from building links to your posts.

In the following video, Google Engineer Matt Cutts puts ome light on common seo misconceptions and how a blogger needs to avoid those pitfalls, if he is concerned regarding the ankings of his webpages on Google search results

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh2pndFKtsg

Do you have any doubts on search engine optimization or do you have some more questions or conceptions to be cleared out ? Shoot your ideas in the comments below

SEO Misconceptions You Should Avoid originally published on Ampercent

Common SEO Mistakes Bloggers Should Avoid

Amit Banerjee — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 10:53:54 +0000

Rand Fishkin has a handy list of common SEO mistakes which one should avoid. It doesn’t matter whether your website is a popular brand or you are just starting out, Rand shares some thoughtful SEO tips. My favorites:

Bad Navigation: You want to impress your visitors with catchy site navigation built with Flash but forget that the search bots are unable to spider the flash links. If you must use Flash in your design, also include a text link so that the bots can discover the most important pages of your site.

Not Performing Keyword research: Only a few websites pay attention to keyword research while most of them publish content without bothering whether the targeted phrase is going to rank or not. This is one of the biggest seo mistake bloggers commit and should be avoided at all costs.

Canonical URL’s: Printer friendly versions of the same webpage containing the same content may result in duplicate content issues. Webmasters should implement canonical URL’s so that the bots are not confused and can easily find the original source.

Syndicating Content to Other Popular Websites: Syndicating your articles to article directories or other news blogs may be useful but not under all circumstances. If the bots discover the syndicated content on the other blog before crawling your article, your blog is at a loss and may face the duplicate content penalty. It’s better to syndicate only a part of the content with a link back to the original article.

Hidden content stored behind logins: If your website is fairly large and consists of thousands of user generated pages that are behind a login, you are missing out on additional traffic. This is because the bots can’t crawl and index pages that are behind a password.

Multiple Sites: There is no point in launching new websites, just because you want to show your visitors how big your company is. If all these websites relate to a same niche, it would be better to create sub directories within a single domain and promote them individually. All the pages will get more PR if they are accessible under a single domain.

Check out Rand’s analysis at Seomoz.org

Common SEO Mistakes Bloggers Should Avoid originally published on Ampercent

Does The Age of a Domain Influence Search Rankings?

Amit Banerjee — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 17:37:00 +0000

How does Google determine the age of a domain? Is domain age an important factor for ranking of my site’s pages? Will hosting a website for a long time and adding no content to it is a good idea ?

These are some of the questions that may arise on your mind, especially if you have started blogging and have lots of doubts. There are several factors which determine how the pages of your site are going to rank in search results – domain age being one of them.

Factors Influencing the Ranking of a Page

Typically, the following factors influence the ranking of a page on search engine result pages:

1. The quality of the content – most important and often most neglected. If your page’s content is unique, useful and better than your competitors page – your page is going to rank higher. It doesn’t matter how big or small your website is.

2. Number of links pointing to your page: If your page has a good number of incoming links, chances are high that it will rank higher on search results.

3. Quality of the links: One link from an authority website is better than hundreds from spam blogs.

4. Other factors – keyword density, anchor texts, loading times, age of the domain and so on.

So how does Google determine the age of a domain ? And whether the age of a website is an important factor in rankings?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pnpg00FWJY

In the above video, Google Engineer Matt cutts discusses the issue with the age of a domain and it’s impact on search rankings. Matt suggests the following points:

The Whois data is not a very good factor in determining the age of a domain. Search engines do not look at the Whoisdata of a domain to determine the age of a webpage.
Instead, Google checks it’s logs and finds when did they crawled the domain through a dofollow link. This applies to the deeper pages as well as to the homepage of your site.

This is because the search engines may not be able to find the whoisdata of every single domain and judge the age of a website.

How Important is the Age of A Domain For Website Authority

There is no reason to worry regarding domain age because it’s only one of the factors which influence search ranks. If there are two sites – A is 6 months old while B is 2 years old, it’s not going to affect that much. What matters is the overall quality of the pages of your website and the number or quality of backlinks.

Hence, stop obsessing about buying older and pre-aged domains that were parked 10 years ago, thinking that developing a website in an older domain is going to boost your search ranks.

Does The Age of a Domain Influence Search Rankings? originally published on Ampercent