SEO Myths and Duplicate Content
Experiencing a bit of search engine blogger’s block this evening and when I do so, I usually turn to the Cre8asite crowd to get my juices stirred up again. There is a new thread in the Search Engine Optimization forum dubbed SEO Myths.
Bill Slawski (Bragadocchio) starts the thread by listing the top 23 SEO myths that he has noticed floating around the SEO forums and blogs. Here’s a sample :
1. SEO copywriting means writing strong copy, then inserting keywords within the copy a number of times.
2. keyword density is important, and you don’t want too much or too little.
3. You should place content above menus to have it “crawled first”
4. Meta tags are the key to high rankings
5. The revisit meta tag can tell search engines to come back on a regular basis
7. The more links the better
8. Pagerank is dead
9. There is a duplicate content penalty
10. There is a certain percentage of duplication that you can get away with before your page will be filtered in the results
Nice list Bill, but are you saying that there is NO duplicate content penalty? Bill goes on to explain his thoughts on duplicate content leading to a site not being indexed by search engines, which would not really be considered a penalty.
“We know from a number of patents from Altavista, that there are ways of identifying mirrored sites, and sites that are very similar to other sites on a number of levels, and that search engines can decide not to include those pages in their index. I’m not sure that is what we are talking about when we talk about a “duplicate penalty.” If it’s what you are considering a duplicate penalty, I’ll concede that aspect of a duplicate penalty.”
Additionally, Bill goes on to explain how Google does not necessarily penalize duplicate content results, but instead group them into “very similar” results which the searcher must then choose to select to view all of the different sites which are featuring the same exact content.
Slawski’s post and continuing replies are quite in depth and recommended for any site publisher who thinks they may be getting a organic rankings jump on the crowd by republishing the works of others, whether they be via republishing agreements or by posting works available from the indexed public domain (I repeat, the indexed one).
