Duplicate content myth and multiple site issues – Google Explanation

Last month Greg Grothaus an Engineer from Google search quality team speaks about what is duplicate content and how they treat website with duplicate content.

Here is the summary of the conference which was held at Search Engine Strategies San Jose.

How webmaster judge if their website is penalize in Google search?
He clearly mentioned that there is no penalty for duplicate content. The main reason webmaster thinks their website penalizes because sometime they find their website in omitted results. Actually web pages listed in omitted results are not penalize but Google want to show diversity in the search results. So, if Google find two different pages with same content and if you search for the specific keyword Google will show the important page for the keyword you typed in and omit the other page. What actually happen if you have two different pages with same printed content and if you don’t block page using robots.txt or meta noindex tag then Google will choose one from the list which it find more useful.

Here is the example of eight different URLs all are identical :

www.example.com
www.example.com/?
www.example.com/index.html
www.example.com/index.php
example.com/index.php
example.com/index.html
example.com/?
example.com/

You will find many website have different URLs from same page. All URLs are different with same content. Google will not penalize your website for this but it will dilute your link popularity. For example if you have several website linking to one page of your site and some other websites pointing to other duplicate URL cumulate link juice. Also search engine get confused in selecting the user-friendly URL and sometime show up wrong URL that offset your branding efforts. Other problem is inefficient crawling because Google crawling the same content for different duplicate pages and give less time to the new pages.

To avoid duplicate content issues use the following steps

(1) Canonical Version: Here you can specify the page which you want Google and other search engines to crawl and ranked.
(2) 301 Redirects: This is called permanent redirect means redirect duplicate pages to your preferred URL.
(3) Also in Google webmaster tool specify version of your website with WWW or without WWW.

Multiple Site Issues

Use different domain names for different country. Write different content for different audiences because here also duplicate content issue affects your ranking in search engines.

If you have same content website for different audience let say for Australian audience and British audience Google will show only one website.
To avoid this problem you need to specify your website region in Google webmaster tools.

Regards,
Bhavesh Goswami.

What is GEO targeting? How it will help my website? How to do it?

The goal behind every website is to increase traffic. It is vital part of targeting your website for the specific visitors who view your website. For example if you are market only covers UK then your content should include this word, so people come to know that your business is mainly focused on UK market.

GEO targeting is the method of online marketing of a website according to the geographical location of visitors of your website. Geo targeting help you to improve the profit and also help users to find more specific results they are looking for.

IP based geo targeting will help you redirect your visitors to the country specific website. For example like Google, if you open google.com from UK it will redirect you to www.google.co.uk this call IP based geo targeting. In PHP a simple script is available which recognized the country by IP address and redirect them.

How it will help in SEO and how to do it?

Geo targeting is also a crucial part in optimization process for your website. Search engines are become advance and change their algorithm regularly to provide up to date information to their searchers. Geo targeting your website for a specific county help search engine to determine your targeted country specific users and accordingly that they improve your ranking in their results.

Search engine first try to find where the website is hosted. If your target market is German or France or Canada and your hosting server located somewhere in USA then it will not help you to optimize your website for country specific search engines. So try to find a web hosting provider whose server is located in your region.

Top level domain or TLD of domain name is also play an important role. If your target customer base is France then try to search for a domain name with country specific TLD like www.yourdomain.fr

Google webmaster tool is another useful way to let Google know which your targeted audience is. You need to create an account in Google Webmaster Tool and then specify your targeted country through drop down box.

Content is the king in optimizing a website. You should also include the country name in your content to let search engine know about your targeted audience.

Regards,
Bhavesh Goswami.

Which website performs better in terms of SEO? – CSS Based or Table Based

Google officials clear some doubts related to website designed based on CSS and Table. Currently wordpress, joomla, Web2.0 and other CMS (Content Management System) becoming more popular and many website owners believes that CSS based website performs well in major search engines.

But Google official Matt Cut clearly mentioned in his recent video both website designed using CSS or Table perform well in search engine. They do not have different criteria for crawling CSS based and Table based websites. What things they consider is only the well structured language. If you are using Table for your website design, do not put your HTML coding in complex table structure, it is hard for search engine to crawl a complex table structure website. If website designed using Table have simple and easy to understand structure then crawler crawl your website without any problem.

To improve your website ranking design your website in manner so search engine can easily access and crawl your website, make sure your website load quickly, your website provide good value for your website visitors, do not optimize your website for search engine but for website visitors and you will win the race.

Regards,
Bhavesh Goswami.

BING - Microsoft Announced New Search Engine

Hi All,

On 28th Nay 2009 morning Microsoft official Steve Ballmer speaking at D Conference where he announced a new improved search product BING. It is stated this is the new improved search product rolling out to Microsoft internal staff and will be publicly available in coming days.



They named Bing as a decision engine that not like a traditional search engine but it helps user to find faster whatever they are looking for on search engine. Bing is an improved search engine which shows perfect relevant search results in well organized manner and also includes unique tools that help to make quick decisions. They invite visitors to take a look at this new improved search engine “Bing”.

For further information visit following link

http://www.bing.com/ComingSoon

Let’s wait for Bing…

Regards,
Bhavesh Goswami.

Google webmaster tool design updates

Google announced a design updates in their webmaster tool. Google stated
"We decided to start from the ground up with a brand new webmaster tools design."



Message Center: In new improved design structure Google now display Message at the top of the dashboard to make sure that you never miss any important notification.

Dashboard: They included all important links on the dashboard like Top search queries, crawl errors, sitemaps and links to your site. These are the link that webmaster often visit.

Top search queries: Google declare that they improved the result in this area and now showing upto 100 search queries through which user came across your website.

XML Sitemap Tracking for multiple users: This new feature allow to track sitemap submitted by other users and check the status of sitemap submitted by you or other user subscribe to Google webmaster tool for the same site.

Improved navigation and menu list: Now it is easy to access navigate through different section of webmaster tool.

Topic wise help: New improved help center will show related help articles for the specific page you are visiting in webmaster tool.

Verification required to access functionality: Before for unverified sites you can use features like sitemaps, robots.txt testing and generate robots.txt. Now in newly improved webmaster tool to access any tool you need to verify your website before accessing any of the functionality.

So, go ahead and check all new features. Best of luck.