Photo By: shuttermonkey

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed a tweet from me a while back lamenting a conflict between a caching plugin and the 301 redirect from non-www to www (or vice versa – whichever is the preferred URL for a given site).  From time to time I check to make sure that the non-www URLs of pages on my site are being properly redirected to the www URLs.

Some time after I started using the w3 Total Cache plugin, that stopped happening.  I was not bursting with fruit flavor, but hey…what are ya gonna do?  It’s a free plugin.  And one that, to that point, had served me very well.  After tweeting about the issue, one of the plugin’s developers responded that it was an issue they were aware of and that it would hopefully be resolved in a future release.

I was happy to hear that, but in the interim and despite how much I liked the w3 Total Cache plugin, I decided to stop using it.  Instead I went back to using WP Super Cache, which did not interfere with the 301 redirect.  When the latest version of w3 Total Cache was released, I tried it again…hoping the issue had been resolved.  Much to my dismay, it hadn’t.  So, back to WP Super Cache I went.  Again.

While I believe certain features of w3 Total Cache – like browser caching, object caching and built in minify functions, make it the better caching plugin, as an SEO the idea of my site having www/non-www canonical issues really stuck in my craw.  Since that’s an issue I always advise site owners to resolve to help mitigate potential link equity issues, I can’t in good conscience not practice what I preach.

That said, I’m a stubborn geek.  And I wanted to find a way to use what I believe to be a superior plugin without having my site continue to suffer from www/non-www canonical URL issues.  I’ve found a solution that is working.  So, I thought I’d share it with you.  DISCLAIMER: DO NOT do this unless you know what you’re doing and know how to fix any problems that may occur as a result of modifying your .htaccess file.  I will not be held responsible if you bork your site.  Consider this your warning!

All I had to do was place the following code at the beginning of my .htaccess file (before # BEGIN WordPress and # BEGIN W3TC Browser Cache):

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

I realize this is the standard code for a 301 redirect, but it had not appeared in my .htaccess file before and the non-www URLs had still always 301 redirected to www URLs – I assume as a basic function of WordPress itself.  That is until the w3 Total Cache plugin was installed, which suggests that it is conflict between a built in function of WordPress and the w3 Total Cache plugin.  Some of you code wonks out there probably know the answer.  I do not profess to be a code wonk, so I can only speculate.

This will only work for sites running on Apache and obviously you need to replace”domain” with YOUR domain.  DUH!  And if I have to tell you to be sure to change .com to .net, .info, .whatever if your domain isn’t a .com, you should stop reading now.  No, seriously…just stop.  This is not the post for you.

Also, if you don’t know what an .htaccess file is and where to find it, as well as what type of server your site runs on (Windows vs. Linux) and whether it’s running Apache, well…you probably would have/should have stopped reading already.  If you didn’t, sorry I wasted your time.  File this in the “for future reference” folder.

So, if you’ve got a WordPress site hosted on an Apache server and you’ve been having trouble with www vs. non-www canonical URL issues because of w3 Total Cache, I hope this solves your problem.  I’ve used this solution on several sites now without a hitch.  If you implement it and it works for you, please come back to let me know.  Good luck!

And remember…DON’T EVEN TRY THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING! Seriously.  As you were.  :)

NOTE:  The solution provided above will redirect non-www URLs to www URLs (my personal preference).  If you want to do the opposite, Meg Geddes was nice enough to provide her advice below.  Thanks, Meg!

Related posts:

1. Canonical URL Issues and Link Equity

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, w3 Total Cache & Canonical URL Issues, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

As is the case with many small business websites these days, there were many opportunities for improvement.  From titles to text content to the development of a strong site architecture and internal link structure, the site was in need of a head-to-toe overhaul and a facelift.  The old site was pretty basic, didn’t incorporate much text content and only had a handful of pages.  Not only did the site not perform well in a keyword search at that point, the original design also had some usability and branding challenges to overcome.

I couldn’t let that continue and not long thereafter my friend and her business partner had a shiny new website that, if I do say so myself, is something they can proudly rely on to represent their brand online.  I know what you’re thinking, “But, Alysson…it doesn’t matter if it’s pretty if no one can find it.”  You’re absolutely right.  I couldn’t have said it better myself.  As I mentioned before, prior to the redesign/relaunch the site had no rankings for any targeted keyword terms.  None.  Zippo.  Zilch.  Nada.

Gleaning Information From Competitors

I’ve obviously been offering my friend a great deal of advice along the way regarding what needs to be done moving forward.  Knowing how bright she is and how likely she is to actually pursue the avenues I advise her to pursue to further improve the site’s rankings now that they have a strong foundation, I knew she’d be doing a lot of investigation and poking around on her own.

She recently sent me an e-mail containing a links to two blog posts that really stuck in my craw.  While the focus of the posts obviously seems to be relative to the advantages of blogging – though that doesn’t really come through as the main topic of the articles at all, there were some statements made in those posts that really got under my skin.

“I am a firm believer that all you need is a website,  a properly hosted blog, and a bit of patience in order to build up a business…”

Wow.  I bet the 80+% of small businesses that fail would have appreciated knowing that.  A website, a blog and some patience…that’s all there is to it?  Damn.  According to the marketing bible of a former DJ turned SEO who describes himself as someone for whom, “…reading and writing have always been the hardest things for me to do ever!“, EVERYTHING ELSE that successful start-ups do is a waste of time, effort and resources.  Someone should really tell them that concentrating on small business website design, usability, online reputation management, branding, etc. is just unnecessary fluff.  Pfft!  Comprehensive SEO strategy?  I don’t need no stinkin’ strategy.  I’m not sure I even know what “comprehensive” means…

Look, that’s one of the most ignorant oversimplifications I’ve ever come across.  It’s like saying all you need to win a Superbowl is an offense, a defense and a properly inflated football.

“With some minor tweaking to her site, a few off-site optimization techniques, and some Search Engine Optimization to her website, only a month later, on April 24th, 2009 to be exact, was already indexed by Yahoo, MSN Live and Google.com…”

<sarcasm>HOORAY!</sarcasm>  I’d like to know what this “minor tweaking”, “a few off-site optimization techniques” and “some Search Engine Optimization” entailed.  First of all…these “minor tweaks” are often not minor at all and are part of an overall strategy.  You can’t refer to “minor tweaking” and “some Search Engine Optimization to her website” as separate things.  Well, I guess you can…but you wouldn’t, if you know what the hell you were talking about.

The “tweaking” to which he refers is actually called “on-site SEO” and it includes making improvements to titles, descriptions, text content, headings, site architecture, text navigation, internal link structure, ALT attributes, image optimization, improvement of page load time, etc.  Dumbing down on-site SEO to nothing more than “minor tweaking” is a ridiculous and dangerous oversimplification of on-site SEO that will lead to problems down the road for anyone who accepts such ignorance as fact.

SHENANIGANS!

Here’s where it really gets to be fun.  It you were to take a look at the tables included in each of those posts, you’d see that all but a couple of search terms are not disclosed.  Really?  You’re trying to prove how awesome you are and how easy SEO is by reporting how crappy a site’s rankings were before your “minor tweaking” vs. how the rankings improved a month later.  I call shenanigans.  And by “shenanigans”, I mean BULLSHIT.  For all we know you’ve improved the site’s ranking for terms that no actual human being would ever use in a keyword search.  Kudos on your transparency.

While I’m sure anyone who publishes a supposed case study without actually publishing the terms being targeted would say it had something to do with confidentiality, again…bullshit.  If you can’t publish the terms, don’t publish the post as a supposed case study.  Not doing so makes the individual rankings and ranking improvements utterly meaningless because there is no way to compare the ranking improvement on a term by term basis.  What appears as “Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword” in row 3 of the first table may not be the same target term that appears as “Wedding Marketing Keyword” in row 3 of the table in the follow-up post.

For example, if you compare the original ranking report (before any optimization was done) to the “month after” ranking report, the “Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword” that appears in row 12 ranks in position 83 on the original report, yet the “Hidden Wedding Marketing Keyword” in row 12 of the follow-up report shows the site is “Not Ranked”.  So a month after the “minor tweaking” was done the site actually went from being ranked in the 83rd position for an unknown keyword to not ranked at all.  Hmm…curious.

Since the Redesign/Relaunch

The new site launched on July 7th, 2010.  Initially I focused my attention on creating optimized, keyword targeted text content for a handful of the target terms within her niche that generate the greatest search volume.  While there are 25-30 terms we want the site to rank well for moving forward, my main concern at the outset was to improve the site’s ranking for the following terms:

• [wedding planners houston] – about 320 searches per month
• [wedding planner houston] - about 320 searches per month
• [houston wedding planners] - about 260 searches per month
• [houston wedding planner] - about 260 searches per month
• [wedding planners in houston] - about 210 searches per month
• [wedding coordinator houston] - about 170 searches per month
• [wedding planning houston] - about 110 searches per month

And let’s not forget that the site wasn’t ranked AT ALL for any search term aside from the actual business name.  In the spirit of transparency, here are the ranking results for the site just 9 days after the relaunch (July 16):

Keyword	Google.com position	Yahoo (United States) position	Bing position
wedding planners houston	31	-	-
wedding planner houston	32	-	-
houston wedding planners	44	-	-
houston wedding planner	49	-	-
event planning houston	153	-	-
wedding planners in houston	38	-	-
event planners houston	117	-	-
event planner houston	127	-	-
wedding coordinator houston	26	-	-
houston party planners	198	-	-
party planning houston	59	-	-
party planners houston	62	-	-
event planners in houston	198	-	-
wedding planning houston	31	-	-
party planner houston	64	-	-
wedding planner in houston	42	10	-
houston wedding planning	37	18	-
houston party planning	182	-	-
party planning in houston	175	132	-
houston wedding coordinators	52	-	-

About 6 weeks after the relaunch (August 15), the site was ranked as follows:

Keyword	Google.com position	Yahoo (United States) position	Bing position
houston event planning	-	153	-
wedding planners houston	27	17	66
wedding planner houston	24	22	48
houston wedding planners	27	33	120
houston wedding planner	39	34	105
event planning houston	90	-	-
wedding planners in houston	33	15	81
event planners houston	83	-	-
event planner houston	84	-	-
wedding coordinator houston	15	-	-
houston party planners	78	-	-
party planning houston	54	-	-
party planners houston	52	-	-
event planners in houston	95	-	-
event planner in houston	101	-	-
wedding planning houston	33	15	33
party planner houston	53	-	-
event planning in houston	140	-	-
wedding planner in houston	34	15	48
party planner in houston	144	-	-
houston wedding planning	37	24	67
houston party planning	136	85	-
party planning in houston	85	105	-
party planners in houston	126	-	-

Keep in mind I changed everything from the platform the site was built on to where it was hosted to the URL structure of the pages.  Literally everything that could be changed was changed.  And those results are based on absolutely no off-site effort on my part whatsoever – these results are based solely on the proper implementation of a comprehensive on-site SEO strategy.

A Half-assed Approach vs. A Complete Strategy

The ranking results being reported for the phantom keywords in parts 1 & 2 of the aforementioned case study were comparisons over a 6 month period…6 MONTHS – from March to August.

Basically what was accomplished with “minor tweaking”, “a few off-site optimization techniques” and “some Search Engine Optimization” in that case study over a period of 6 months, I accomplished with on-site SEO alone in 6 weeks.  THAT is the difference between the results from a “see…it’s SO easy” novice and an experienced SEO who actually understands the big picture.  SEO is much more than a laundry list of tasks that can be carried out by any trained monkey with a keyboard.  It is a little bit of art combined with a touch of science.  It takes experience.  It involves understanding not only the individual ranking factors, but how those factors work together and how their cumulative impact affects a site’s ranking.

This statement is particularly nonsensical and misleading:

I started to believe what other people were saying. I was believing Ignorant people that stated that the only way to rank high for Google was to pay someone to do it for you… Can you believe that? That’s the most absurd thing I had ever heard… first thing is how would you pay someone and second is why would Google do that? It made no sense to me at the time and it makes no sense to me now.

Why it DOES make sense:  the ability to achieve better results based on the on-site SEO efforts alone in 6 weeks.  While hiring a professional may not make sense to him, it does make sense to real small business owners.  Measurable results in 6 weeks.  Not 6 months.

A comprehensive strategy is essential to the long term success of any small business website.  Ranking well is only part of the equation.  Conversions are really where the rubber meets the road.  In a niche with little competition it may be possible to rank well for some target terms without incorporating every aspect of on-site SEO, but why wouldn’t you do it anyway?

The ranking factors are not created by search engines without rhyme or reason.  Well-written text content serves to inform site visitors.  Proper site architecture makes the site easy to navigate.  ALT attributes make it easier for the visually impaired to browse a site thanks to the use of software like JAWS.  Internal links help visitors find the information they need more easily.  Optimized images help pages load faster.  Faster load times get users where they want to go faster.

Virtually everything the search engines incorporate into their algorithms as a ranking factor is specifically intended to improve the user experience.  Search engines want to lead people to the websites that offer the best user experience.  And you should want your website to offer the best user experience.  Whether a site ranks in the #1 position or the #300 position, if it isn’t user friendly, doesn’t convey the right message and isn’t visually appealing people will go elsewhere.  A complete SEO strategy takes into consideration how A will impact B, how B will impact C and how A+B+C will cumulatively impact both ranking and user experience.

This is why the SEO industry suffers from such massive reputation problems.  A little bit of information in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing.  Ignorance has its own unique opportunity cost.  Egregious oversimplifications hurt everyone.

photo credit: MrB-MMX, photo credit: cogdogblog and photo credit: Aaron_M

No related posts.

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, The Dangers of Oversimplifying Niche SEO, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

The information contained within many a website SEO audit is a confusing mix of technical jargon and a laundry list of problems with very little information that you, as the small business owner, can take action on. If the audit states the site is suffering from canonical URL issues, poor internal link structure, duplicate content problems, keyword cannibalization, etc., what does all of that mean to you? If you’re like most small business owners, it may as well be written in Chinese. Many SEOs create these audits specifically to result in your hiring them to resolve the issues for you. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this practice, but it’s important that you understand that to be the case.

Let’s face it…not all small business owners are in a position to pay thousands of dollars to optimize their websites. Does that mean they should abandon all hope, throw their hands up in frustration and resign themselves to perpetually poor performance in the organic search results? Absolutely not. What it DOES mean is that where to spend marketing dollars and what to invest in SEO efforts is essential. If you’re among most small business owners, you don’t have a lot of free time, but you have more time to spend these days than money. For you, choosing the right SEO audit – one that will provide you with more than just a laundry list of problems – is very important.

What Will You Do After The SEO Audit – Have A Basic Plan

Have you stopped to think about what you intend to do with the information contained within the SEO audit? If you haven’t, don’t have an audit done – yet. There is a LOT more to consider when deciding who to hire to do your audit than price. Audits can range in price from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. Before investing a dime of your small business marketing budget on a website audit, you need to have some idea what you intend to do with what you learn from it. If you spend $2,000 on an audit, how much of your budget will then be left to put toward actually fixing the site’s problems? If your answer is, “nothing”, you need to find a more affordable SEO audit.

Is your plan to hire the company that conducted the audit to resolve the issues? Do you intend to have the site’s original designer address the issues? Are you going to fix the problems yourself? Your goals, what you hope to learn and your future plans for resolving problems once they are identified are all important things to take into consideration BEFORE deciding who will audit your site. Not taking these things into consideration can cost you a LOT of time and money. The only thing worse than avoiding SEO audits is choosing the wrong one. If the audit doesn’t ultimately result in the necessary changes being made, it’s a complete waste of money.

Resolving On-Site SEO Issues – Understanding Your Options

You don’t HAVE to hire SEOs or SEO companies to improve your site’s organic SEO performance. If you have the flexibility within your marketing budget to contract a reputable SEO or hire an SEO professional to handle optimization for you in-house, that’s fantastic – and is obviously the optimal solution. I suggest you stop wasting your time reading this and do so immediately. That isn’t, however, a realistic option for many small business owners facing today’s economic challenges and shrinking marketing budgets.

The truth is that there are many on-site SEO tasks that can be tackled by designers, developers, or even by YOU – the small business website owner. While there are numerous things to consider in a comprehensive optimization effort, resolving basic on-site SEO issues is a huge step in the right direction toward improving your site’s search engine friendliness and organic SEO performance. That said, HUGE mistakes can be made if you or your designer aren’t careful or aren’t provided with the right information.

Let’s be clear: if you’re going to rely on whomever designed the site initially to resolve the issues, you should assume they know little to nothing about SEO. Why? If they knew much about building a search engine friendly site, they likely would have done so from the get-go and the site wouldn’t suffer from basic issues like unoptimized titles, poor META tag relevancy, lack of text navigation, etc.

That said, if you intend to rely on your designer or developer to resolve the issues, be prepared to tell them exactly what the issues are and provide them with information about how to go about fixing it. Many designers and developers claim to understand SEO, but more often than not this simply isn’t true. In this case, the usual “laundry list” SEO audits won’t cut the mustard.

Knowing the site doesn’t have an adequate internal link structure won’t be enough for the typical designer or developer to know what to do next. Telling them to fix the keyword cannibalization issues won’t be enough to ensure that it actually gets done. And if YOU don’t have a basic understanding of what keyword cannibalization is, you won’t know where to begin to check to see if the issues have been taken care of.

Not only will they (or you) need to be told what’s wrong, but – more importantly – what is involved in resolving those issues, some of which may be specific to an individual page and some of which may be site-wide issues that will need to be fixed on every page throughout the site. Unless the SEO audit helps create an understanding of not only what must be changed, but how and why it is important, someone who doesn’t already understand SEO will find it useless.

Website Audits Are A First Step – Not “THE” Solution

Think of a website audit as a diagnosis, not a solution to your website’s problems. Just like fatigue, fainting or a fever are indications to your doctor that something is amiss with your health, a site that performs poorly in an organic search is merely a symptom of the website’s underlying problems. An audit is a diagnostic tool. The treatment program, i.e. the overall SEO strategy, begins to take shape once the specific problems have been identified.

The right audit will help you better understand what aspects of the strategy you can carry out yourself and what is best tackled only by an SEO professional. Choosing the right SEO Audit – like choosing the right doctor – is an important first step toward reaching your goals. The most important thing to understand about any SEO effort is that it cannot be approached as a simple, one-time “project”. Successful SEO is an ongoing process. Websites that perform well in the organic search results are constantly monitored and changes continue to be made on an ongoing basis in order to maintain consistent, long-term success.

No related posts.

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, Choosing The Website Audit That Is Best For YOUR Needs, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

For those who aren’t familiar with canonical URL issues, also referred to as url canonicalization (and sometimes “canonical home page issues” – which is technically incorrect as it does not just apply to the home page), put simply it is having the same page show up on multiple URLs inadvertently – not to be confused with purposely having multiple pages that contain the same text content.

If, for instance, your home page is accessible at both www.domain.com and domain.com, your site is suffering from canonical URL issues. In the worst case scenario, some pages are accessible at up to 6 or 7 different URLs…or more.

What URLs Are Being Linked To

While the duplicate content created by canonical URL issues may or may not have a negative impact on ranking, one thing is certain: it DOES have an impact on the link equity of the page. What does that mean? Well, in short, if the same page can be accessed using two, three, four or more URLs, it means each of those URLs could be bookmarked or shared on a variety of social media outlets or linked to by other websites.

Let’s say that 100 sites link to your home page, but your home page is accessible at www.domain.com, domain.com, www.domain.com/index.html and domain.com/index.html – all of which contain the same useful, and clearly popular content, based on 100 sites linking to it. Now, let’s say that 25 of those sites link to the URL www.domain.com, 25 others link to domain.com, another 25 to www.domain.com/index.html, and the last 25 to domain.com/index.html.

All of the links ultimately serve up the same content, so it doesn’t make any difference…right? WRONG! Instead of the home page being given credit for having 100 links, those four separate URLs are considered individual pages by the search engines and each is given credit for having only 25 links – even though the links ultimately lead a user to the same content. DOH! In a world controlled by Google and PageRank, the number of external links pointing to an individual URL can have an enormous impact on ranking.

What About Duplicate Content?

While some were put at ease by Google’s post back in September, entitled “Demystifying the Duplicate Content Penalty“, some in the search marketing industry still remain convinced that duplicate content issues can hurt a page’s ranking in the search results – myself included. I, and many of my search marketing colleagues, have enough experience to understand that leaving Google to figure things out for themselves and determining which URL should be the preferred URL in the search results is like playing Russian roulette – a point that I elaborated on in a previous post, “Duplicate Content – Did Google Do A 180?“.

The Solution: A 301 Redirect

Creating a 301 redirect is somewhat technical and involves making changes to the .htaccess file in the root directory of your domain, so most small business owners aren’t comfortable creating or modifying the file themselves. This is generally something that is best undertaken by an IT professional. That said, here is the redirect code that should be placed within the .htaccess file on (provided your server is running Apache with mod_rewrite enabled):

NOTE: this is the 301 rewrite code for a server running Apache – if your server is not running Apache, the redirect code is likely different from what is included above. This is yet another reason that creating a 301 redirect by modifying the .htaccess file is often tackled by an IT professional.

A 301 redirect points the browser to a single, preferred URL – the typical choice is www.domain.com. That means that if someone were to follow a link that pointed to domain.com, www.domain.com/index.html, or domain.com/index.html it will be redirected to www.domain.com automatically.

The biggest advantage to creating a 301 redirect is that existing links to any of the variations of that URL will continue to pass “link juice” – meaning you don’t have to inform the sites that may have linked to one of the newly redirected URLs of the change and there is no risk of losing the link juice being passed by those links.

Referring back to the previous example, adding a 301 redirect for domain.com, www.domain.com/index.html and domain.com/index.html will result in links to those URLs being recognized as links to www.domain.com, so www.domain.com will receive credit for all 100 links, rather than 25 links being attributed to each of four individual URLs. Problem solved!

Related posts:

1. w3 Total Cache & Canonical URL Issues

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, Canonical URL Issues and Link Equity, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

Calling it a “penalty” vs. a “filter” is nothing more than semantics.  Stating that there is no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty” is Google’s feeble attempt to make it seem as though they aren’t unfairly penalizing individual URLs in their self-appointed role policing the Internet.  The fact of the matter is that it doesn’t matter whether a page suffers from an actual “penalty” or not.  If it is “filtered out” of the results for having content that is too similar to another page already listed in the index, does it really matter if it’s technically referred to as a “penalty” or a “filter”?  The ultimate result is the same – people will be able to more easily find one page than another.  Period.

I completely understand Google’s goal in eliminating duplicate content from their search results.  Imagine what SERPs would look like, taking into consideration the number of cookie-cutter, affiliate websites in existence today, if duplicate content weren’t factored into a site’s ranking?  Part of any search engine’s goal, Google included, is to provide its users with relevant and unique information.  If searching for the term “weight loss supplements” resulted 100 identical Herbalife sites, each with a different URL and the exact same information, how reliable would you believe those results to be?  There is a reason duplicate content is frowned upon…and it should be.

It appears that Google, at least in this latest official post, is referring specifically to inadvertent and non-malicious duplicate content within a given site.  I have suspected for some time that this sort of duplicate content has a low level of impact on a site’s ranking.  Think, for example, about the number of WordPress sites that rank highly for competitive search terms.  Many of those sites contain sidebars that are identical on every page.  If that sort of duplicate content were penalized…or, uh…excuse me, if that sort of duplicate content were to trigger Google’s “filters”, that would likely have a negative impact on the ranking of each page.  That hasn’t been my experience.

What about duplicate content from other sites (i.e. scraped content)?  How does Google determine whether or not a site that scrapes content is malicious?  In my opinion, stealing my intellectual property and regurgitating it on your own site as if you created it IS malicious under any circumstances and should be penalized accordingly.  Google apparently doesn’t agree, as illustrated by a number of documented experiences with scraper sites outranking the original source due in large part to having a higher PR than the site where the information was originally published.

Google doesn’t do as good a job at this as they’d like to believe.  Many a webmaster, SEO and search marketing guru has weighed in on the issue and the consensus, at least from what I’ve read, is pretty clear:  duplicate content, regardless of its source, can have a negative impact on ranking and DON’T LET GOOGLE FIGURE STUFF OUT ON THEIR OWN!  These posts seem to reiterate that it is important to put forth a modicum of effort to address what is within your control when it comes to the issue of duplicate content within your own site:

http://searchengineland.com/080915-121927.php
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-pagerank-play-doh/5504/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
http://www.sugarrae.com/be-a-normalizer-a-c14n-exterminator/
http://janeandrobot.com/post/canonical-url-canonicalization-domain.aspx
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonicalization-update/

I mean, seriously – are all of these experts full of crap?  Matt Cutts included?  I’d venture to say that they’re not…and preventing duplicate content issues from occuring in the first place is likely the best option for anyone concerned about driving traffic to a site via Google’s organic search results.  As for duplicate content from another site…I think we all know there is little, if anything, that can truly be done about that and we have no choice but to leave it to Google to sort out those issues on their own.

Google likes to toot their own horn and proclaim that they’ve “got it covered”, but the fact of the matter is that the more you leave to Google’s bots to “figure out” the more time must be spent doing so…meaning greater resources and server load.  Why?  Why not just make things as clean and simple as possible?  Does this recent clarification by Google mean that we should no longer concern ourselves with resolving a site’s canonical homepage issues?  Does it mean that it’s no longer necessary to restrict bot access to printer friendly versions of pages?  Does it mean that multiple URLs resolving with the same content will be ignored, but have no negative impact on the ranking of the preferred URL?  No…I don’t think their claim to have a handle on duplicate content issues means any of that.

What it does mean is that Google is, as always, making every effort to improve the experience for its users – with or without consideration for the impact to webmasters.  They will likely always error on the side of caution when it comes to preventing SPAM and other malicious activity within search results.  To a certain extent, that is for the good of all…provided that Google recognizes the disconnect between what they claim to be true vs. the real-world experiences of many SEOs in dealing with duplicate content issues to this point.

If duplicate content wasn’t factored into ranking, the SERPs would be dominated by a large number of identical affiliate sites and little else in some queries.  “Penalty” or not, there is a definitive reason that a search for “Herbalife” doesn’t result in finding Herbalife’s thousands of identical, cookie-cutter affiliate websites…and I believe at least part of that reason to be duplicate content.  Don’t piss on my leg and then tell me it’s raining, Google!  Give me a break!

See what others within the industry are saying on this issue at Search Engine Roundtable and Sphinn.

Related posts:

1. Canonical URL Issues and Link Equity

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, Duplicate Content – Did Google Do A 180?, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

I officially started this test on 09/24, using Rank Checker to run an initial analysis.  Check out the results, should you so desire.  At the time the report was run, the site had one <h1> located within the header.  All other paragraph headings were <h6> and that had been the case for several weeks prior to beginning the “test”.

After running Rank Checker, I adjusted the headings on the site’s home page to include the <h1> in the header (unchanged), remaining paragraph headings were adjusted to include <h2> and <h3>, rather than <h6> as before.  I used CSS to maintain an appropriate font size, style and color within the content of the page.  No other changes were made to the page content and/or site structure.

I will be interested to see if headings have any impact on the ranking of the homepage whatsoever.  Some still believe that headings have an impact on ranking, but some believe headings to be an antiquated aspect of on-site SEO.  Having used an established and indexed domain, as well as a page with content that is relatively static, should ultimately offer some insight as to whether or not headings play into the ranking of a page.

In the meantime, I welcome anyone with similar documented testing on the use of heading tags to share your experiences here!  I’d like to get more feedback on this issue, as there appears to be a great deal of confusion and/or disagreement on the potential impact of headings among search marketing experts these days!

Related posts:

1. How Important Are Headings These Days?

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, The Jury Is Still Out On Headings…, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

At that time, it was my understanding that NOSNIPPET would allow me to better control what appears as the description within Google’s SERPs.  I assumed Google would automatically default back to the description META tag itself.  I was wrong.  Wrong…wrong…wrong.  What NOSNIPPET caused Google to do in my case was to show no description of the page at all – opting instead only to show the page title.  Upon realizing this (on August 15th…shortly before writing the original post) I promptly removed all NOSNIPPET arguments from all pages.  Testing…isn’t that we we SEOs do?  I guess that’s what they mean by “trial & error”.  ;)

Here is the result of my having removed the NOSNIPPET argument from my robots META tag:

As you can see, the pages are now appearing with the appropriate descriptions as they should have been initially.  And as they likely would have been  if I’d just left it alone in the first place.  My goal to begin with was to control something that hadn’t even become a problem.  I’ve always been the type to attempt to anticipate a problem and prevent it from occurring…I’m very proactive in nature.  At least in this case, my proactivity caused a problem that may never have occurred in the first place.  Lesson learned.

It was important that I test the NOSNIPPET argument at some point, but I likely should have done a bit more research on it’s original intent prior to doing so.  Now that I know what it does, or at least what it did in this case, I can’t imagine a reason for wanting to use it.  I can’t think of a page worth listing in the index that wouldn’t benefit from having a corresponding description.  Why would anyone want a page listed in the index without a description?  And if there is no ultimate goal of increasing click-through rates, why not just NOINDEX the page and keep it out of the SERPs altogether.

I’d love to get some feedback on the legitimate use of NOSNIPPET and any thoughts on the logic behind having a page listed in the SERPs with just a title and no description!  Did I mention that I have removed the nofollow commands from my post comments?  To dissuade spammers, you do have a leave a certain number of comments before the NOFOLLOW is removed…but it is a low number and I know you’ll all understand.  :)

Please feel free to discuss away!  ;)

Related posts:

1. Unexpected Results Using NOSNIPPET

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, Final Results of NOSNIPPET Testing, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

Todd Friesen (a.k.a. Oilman) has since informed me that the nosnippet argument instructs Google not to show a description in the SERPs at all…and that appears to be confirmed by at least some of the results above.  It doesn’t, however, explain why some pages/posts appear with the META description and others appear with nothing at all, despite all pages/posts having included the nosnippet argument when they were indexed.

I have since removed all of the nosnippet arguments from all pages of SEOAly to see how long it takes Google to update the info in their index.  I will also be interested to see if they elect to use the description META tags I have created for each page/post or simply choose their own random text to display.  Equally confusing is the fact that ALL pages of SEOAly previously included the nosnippet tag…yet, as you can see in the image above, some results DO include descriptions – and the text is clearly what is included within the description META tags themselves.  A little consistency…that’s all I ask, Google!

On the flip side, before fully understanding the apparent outcome of using a nosnippet tag, I also decided to use it for our Welcome Home Pet Sitting website.  I hoped it would help me better control the information included in the SERPs and thereby increase the click through rates to our site.  As illustrated by the image below, the results of using nosnippet on that site weren’t exactly what I had anticipated…the results are also measurably different than what has occurred with SEOAly.  Nonetheless, nosnippet did function as I believed it would for the other static pages of the site, allowing me to achieve the goal of having a modicum of control over what potential clients learn about us solely from SERPs.

As you can see, despite the use of the nosnippet argument on the home page, Google elected to generate the SERP description for that page automatically based on the page text – much to my dismay!  The second result in the image above, one of two blog articles I have written for that site, shows no description at all.  The second blog entry (result 7 above) shows the actual META description of the post, as do the rest of the static pages of the site – all of which included the nosnippet argument when they were indexed.  Those results are what led me to believe that my theory regarding a nosnippet argument resulting in Google defaulting to the META description to be correct.  It now appears my theory clearly wasn’t correct.  I now don’t have a clue why anyone would want to use nosnippet at all, if the intended result is having no description included in the SERPs…

Prior to my incorporating the nosnippet argument into Welcome Home’s pages, Google was randomly generating the description for all pages of the site, despite the existence of a unique description META tag on each page.  That is what prompted me to test the use of nosnippet in the first place.  Initially I got the results I expected – Google replaced the randomly generated SERP descriptions with the text included within the description META tag itself – they did NOT eliminate the SERP description altogether.  “Sweet…”, I thought…”theory confirmed”.  Uh, yeah…not so much, it appears.  I’ve also since removed the nosnippet tag from Welcome Home’s site to see how things shake out without it.

Despite the issues I’m trying to resolve in fully understanding the purpose of the nosnippet argument, BIG kudos to Danny at SEOmoz for including that on his SEO Cheat Sheet.

Related posts:

1. Final Results of NOSNIPPET Testing

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, Unexpected Results Using NOSNIPPET, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

Some of the powers that be were supposedly informed by “someone with a great deal more knowledge and experience in the field of SEO…” than I that headings don’t impact ranking and are “an old SEO trick”.  I disagree whole-heartedly, but haven’t really done enough long-term testing on multiple sites to back my claims up with supporting data.  The sad part is that he doesn’t have supporting evidence either, but apparently his “reputation” provides him with enough authority to not have to support his contentions with actual proof.  It certainly made me question his commitment to the aspects of on-page SEO and wonder if he’s mostly a link whore.

Headings Just Make Sense

Just the theory behind paragraph headings themselves speaks to the very core of SEO…usability.  Paragraph headings are a short and sweet summary of the text content below it.  They naturally lend themselves to the inclusion of the search terms targeted by the content that follows.  Since we all know that keyword density itself is a myth and that the positioning of keywords within the content is what is important, but what about headings? It only seems natural that extra “weight” would be given to whatever terms the search engines find within heading tags.

One would also have to assume that to a certain extent LSI would demand that primary terms be identified clearly – based in part on their position within the context of the page content.  Headings seem like a natural, user-friendly way to communicate the focus of the text information included within a website page to algorithms, as well as users.  Just like internal linking improves a user’s ability to navigate to the information they desire, headings improve a user’s ability to scan content and locate the specific information they need within a given page.  Right?

Using Multiple Heading Tags

I’ve used multiple H1, H2 and H3 tags on a single page without any noticible decline in ranking.  On the other hand, I’ve come across a number of sources that indicate using each of them only once on a single page is optimal.  I have decided to let a test page ride for 30 days with multiple headings and determine where the ranking ends up.  I’ll then modify it to include just one H1, H2 and H3 tag to see what impact, if any, it has on the ranking.  I may then remove the headings from the same page altogether to see what, if any, difference that makes.  I guess that will help me answer the question regarding the importance of headings for myself.

In the meantime, I’d love to get some feedback regarding other’s experiences and opinions regarding H1, H2 and H3 tags.  Important?  Not important?  Old SEO Trick?  An essential element of on-page SEO?  You tell me!  My experience lends itself to support the argument that they are “important” and “an essential element of on-page SEO”, but I’m still technically a rookie…I need some industry vets to weigh in here.

Related posts:

1. The Jury Is Still Out On Headings…

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, How Important Are Headings These Days?, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.

Thanks to the Internet, a housewife in Arizona can hop on the computer and order a vacuum cleaner from a guy in New Hampshire without ever changing out of her PJ’s. And Billy Businessman in New Hampshire can thank the search engines for leading Bonnie Buyer from Arizona right to his virtual storefront. Not only is that kind of on-demand information and instant gratification great for consumers, but Internet marketing is the door that many small businesses need to target a nationwide audience, rather than being limited to a specific local or regional geographic area.  On-Page SEO and keyword research are the keys that help today’s small business owner open that door!

The “CliffsNotes” Explanation of SEO

Simply put, SEO refers to the strategy behind achieving a strong natural ranking in the search engine results for specific keywords/keyword phrases. It is essential that a small business owner know what applicable terms are most popular with the people searching for their products or services. Keyword research will help to identify the most popular target terms in a given industry. When it comes to optimizing a site for the search engines, identifying the most popular target terms through keyword research should be atop the to-do list.

There are basically two core aspects of Search Engine Optimization: “on-page SEO” and “off-page SEO”. On-page refers to making specific changes to the source code of a website page.  Common on-page topics include, but are not limited to: META tags, headings, text content, keyword density, ALT attributes, etc. Off-page refers to the tactics employed to build the site’s reputation (or “authority”) with the search engines by building links from other sources and utilizing a variety of Social Media / Social Networking resources to expose your site, and therefore your small business, to potential visitors.  Links and visitors, as well as the authority that comes with both, can come from a variety of sources, like blogs, forums, discussions, online directories and social bookmarking sources like Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon – all of which fall into the category of off-page SEO.

Small Business Owners Better Get In The Game

Marketing has changed. I no longer have to settle for the products I can find in my hometown…I can order a handbag from the other side of the world, if I so choose. Thanks to search engines, a great deal on a Louis Vuitton knock-off is never more than a few keystrokes away. For that reason, websites and search engines are major marketing avenues of choice for large and small businesses alike.

The reason for the shift is that consumers, today more so than ever before, are turning to search engines to find important information about the products and services they need or want.  They also use the Internet to find information about the companies they’re considering doing business with.  The bigger and better your reputation is online (meaning the more interaction you choose to have with potential visitors), the more search users are apt to find you through a wide variety of sources – not JUST search engines.

Being a success in small business today means having to embrace a big picture mentality.  Internet marketing has helped to level the playing field for many small business owners. Taking the time to implement a proper strategy that incorporates both off-page and on-page SEO can provide a small business with as much Internet exposure as a major corporation. Within the natural or organic search results, the financial resources of a corporation mean nothing. Organic results are unbiased (meaning you can’t “pay” for a position within the natural ranking) and rely essentially on how search engine friendly the site is from a design standpoint, as well as a number of off-page factors like link popularity.

Whether you already have a website or it is on your “to-do” list, it’s never too late to get started with keyword research. Once you know the specific terms your site should target, you can move on to the other the tasks ahead of you. Those tasks include everything from developing unique META tags for each page of the site to creating keyword-rich, robust text content for the pages being optimized. There will be future posts on these topics. You can’t hope to build a search engine friendly site without starting somewhere – and that “somewhere” is keyword research.

On-Page SEO Strategies Depend On Keyword Research

Small businesses whose marketing plans exclude online marketing struggle to succeed, and typically end up failing in the long run. That is a harsh reality of the Information Age. That said, simply having a website isn’t enough…not only must the site exist, consumers must be able to find it. Learning more about SEO can help you understand how to help consumers find your site more easily…and what the search engines look for in a “search engine friendly” website.

When a user inputs the phrase “refurbished bose speakers” into a search query, the search engines’ goal is to list the sites that provide the most useful, relevant and popular information about “refurbished bose speakers” that exists in the index.  SEO helps to ensure that sites which have been optimized to target the term “refurbished bose speakers” appear more highly in the results, making those sites easier to find. Keyword research can help you determine the most popular terms the apply to your site and greatly increase the potential traffic to it!

SEO vs. SEM?

SEO is the acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”, while “SEM” is the acronym for “Search Engine Marketing”. But aren’t they the same thing, you ask? No…they’re not the same thing at all. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is dedicated solely to improving the ranking of a website within the natural or organic SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, basically refers to any and everything that goes into generating business through the search engines – including, but not limited to: pay-per-click advertising, lead generation services, banner advertising, etc. Both rely a great deal on keyword research to identify the terms most often used by consumers in a search.

Organic vs. Pay-Per-Click

How easily visitors find a site depends on it’s position within the search results. The ultimate goal of SEO is to help search engines identify the most user-friendly sites and position them near the top of the natural search results. Sites that aren’t properly optimized to be user-friendly must rely on pay-per-click advertising campaigns and appear within the “Sponsored…” or “Featured…” results above, below or beside the organic listings.

SEO is dedicated to ranking a site well in the natural listings – helping to eliminate the a potentially large pay-per-click investment. A natural listing can drive a thousand visitors to your site a day without costing you a dime. The same thousand visitors from a pay-per-click campaign could cost in excess of $100…$500…$1000 or more, depending on the cost-per-click. And there is no guarantee that any of the thousand pay-per-click visitors will convert into incoming revenue.  That’s a pretty big financial gamble for most small business owners.

So, what’s the best alternative to pay-per-click? Learn the best practices of SEO in order to create a search engine friendly website that will rank well in the natural results, that’s what. Ignorance is often costly when it comes to online marketing – like the assumption that pay-per-click advertising will lead to more sales. It has been my experience using SEO to achieve high rankings in the natural search results lead to greater conversion of site visitors into paying customers.

Sold – What’s Next?

Start with keyword research. Nothing else matters unless you know what terms people use to find your products or services in a search. You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you as it is, not doing keyword research is the best way to guarantee you’ll have to do it all twice. Aspiring small business owners must be prepared to wear many hats. There is a lot more to marketing a successful small business than there was before the advent of the Internet. The success or failure of many small business today hinges on consumers finding a website on the Internet. Having a better understanding of SEO and how search engines drive traffic to websites is essential to your success.

Keyword research will provide you with invaluable information – and, provided that you are willing to do the work yourself, all it will cost you is time. There are hundreds of self-proclaimed “SEO experts” out there ready to take your money. As with many aspects of running a small business, doing some or all of the SEO work yourself will be a far less expensive route.  It’s not that it won’t cost you anything – but the cost will be time, rather than money.  The real question is whether you’re willing to learn how to do the required work yourself or whether you should hire an SEO firm to do it for you.

DIY (do-it-yourself) or DIFM (do-it-for-me)?

There is literally nothing that an SEO firm can do to improve a site’s ranking that you can’t do yourself, if you’re willing to learn what to do and how to do it. Whether you decide to hire an firm to do the legwork for you or invest the time to do it yourself, you should still have a basic understanding of the process. At the very least, I would recommend doing some keyword research on your own. Even if you ultimately decide to hire someone to do the work, you will have the peace of mind of knowing whether the terms they suggest you target are ever used in a search.  You can tell a lot about the legitimacy of an SEO company based on the terms they provide you with as “target terms”.  It’s not much of a gamble to guarantee a page one ranking for “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious cupcakes”…ranking on page one for “iPods”, on the other hand – that’s another story altogether.

DIY On-Page SEO Step One: Detailed Keyword Research

A successful SEO strategy hinges upon identifying the most popular target terms that apply to the site. Imagine you’re on a ship at sea…you want to chart a course for the nearest port, but have no idea where to go or even where you are. A navigation system not only knows where you are, but can also chart a course for any destination you desire. Keyword research is like turning on a ship’s navigation system…leading the way toward increased website traffic like a lighthouse on the shore. Keyword research should be the very first task on any SEO “to-do” list.

First, make a list of all of the terms you believe search users would input into a search query. Remember, the more keywords and keyword phrases included on your original list, the more complete your research will be! Once you’ve completed the list, you can use one of many free keyword research tools available. While there are numerous keyword research tools out there, here are two of my favorites:

SEO Book – good comparative data on average daily search volume from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.
Keyword Discovery – cumulative data from a variety of sources indicating search volume over twelve months

Creating an SEO strategy is really like putting together a puzzle, with a good ranking in search engines being the finished picture on the box. Just like every puzzle is different, so is every website’s SEO strategy. While I’m no puzzle master, it has been my experience that it’s easier to put together the outside edges of the puzzle first. Think of the terms you identify through keyword research like the outside of the puzzle…providing structure and organization as you piece together the rest of the big picture. Without a doubt, all SEO strategies require proper keyword research before any work is done to the site itself.

Guarantees From “SEO Companies”

SEO horror stories aren’t hard to find. It’s not uncommon for me to hear, “I found a company that guarantees I’ll be on page one of Google for “weight loss” in 7-10 days…and it’s only going to cost me $2,000 up front and $100 a month…I have to sign a year contract, but its guaranteed, so…”. I’m sure you did. And I’m sure they’re a reputable company and that guarantee doesn’t sound at all like it could be TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE.

There are many search marketing firms out there ready to take advantage of your SEO ignorance. Sorry, but it’s true. They’ll often approach business owners with promises of increased traffic and sales – which are both reasonable expectations of any worthwhile SEO strategy. What should raise a red flag are the promises that seem too good to be true…like “page 1 in 7 days…” and “10,000 links within 48 hours…”. Like most everything else, there are proper ways and improper ways to achieve the same goal. Many SEO companies sacrifice long term results for short term gains, because they know by the time your domain is thrown out of Google, they’ll already have your money.

That’s right, thrown out of Google. Sites discovered employing what are considered “black hat” tactics are simply banned from the index altogether – never to be allowed to return. What good does it do to con Google into ranking a site on page one, only to have the site kicked out completely a few months later? Unless you only intend to keep your small business open for 6 months, you should look into a better online marketing strategy – I’d suggest doing SEO the right way!

Be leery of any SEO firm that offers a guarantee…particularly guarantees of “page 1 rankings…” and “page 1 of Google in 7 days or less…”. If Matt Cutts can’t guarantee the top position in Google for $500,000, I certainly don’t see how anyone else can.

No related posts.

For a limited time, save 50% on my already insanely affordable small business website design service. Or learn more about SEO audit and keyword research services.The post, On-Site SEO & Keyword Research – Important to Small Business?, originated on SEOAly and may not be republished or reproduced without my written permission.