A fellow SEO consultant sent me this Search Engine Land article written mainly on the SEO impact of HTML 5 with the comment: ” This guy doesn’t seem to be on the schema.org bandwagon.”

What’s Wrong with HTML 5, Microdata and Schema.org?

After reading the article, here are the main points Keery Dean makes against HTML 5 microdata tags using Schema.org vocabulary on your website.  People can simply go overboard and tag every possible thing on a webpage. This would cause code bloat and eventually nullify the effectiveness granted by search engines due to overuse.

Well, here’s the thing.  Overusing any type of tag is basically SPAM.

As website SEO professionals, we have to be sensible, practical and strategic.  Every SEO consultant should be able to spout off the known types of on-page SEO SPAM.  The oldest forms of SPAM mainly boil down to excessive use of keywords, A.K.A keyword stuffing.  The goal of over optimization of a website, being to game the search engine algorithm, tends to create poor user experience.  This is contrary to the search engine goal, which is to provide high quality user experience search results.  With the emergence of new technology, it is in our best interest to apply the principles of SEO best practices.  Microdata is a tool.  Use it when it makes sense.  Use it strategically, when needed.  Otherwise, as Kerry Dean points out, it becomes useless code bloat. …continue reading this SEO article »

Updated: March 27, 2012

Google, Bing and Yahoo cracked down hard on duplicate content starting December 2010.  Penalties hit hardest on February 24, 2011 in the Google Panda algorithm update.  Bing and Yahoo rankings followed suite.

How To: The SEO Tools and Process to Address Duplicate Content

Comparison SEO Tool

An SEO services client with which we work has developed multiple websites for different brands, but the client recycled the content.  Instead of writing 100% unique text for each website, paragraphs and sometimes whole pages were used universally across multiple websites.  They were getting away without noticeable revenue loss, so despite existing duplicate content penalties (though not actual penalties – more accurately wasting crawl budget and possibly dividing link juice) on interior entry pages, the client decided it was not a big enough priority to rewrite all the content … until now.

February search engine algorithm updates penalized entire websites that have pages similar to any other site that the search engine credits as the originator. Even if words are rearranged and the brand name is switched out, the Google algorithm is not fooled.  Google chooses one website as the originator and penalizes the others.

In late 2010, various rankings started to slip.  On February 24th, clients with duplicate or similar content across different websites saw a total drop off for #1 ranked keyword phrases.   Google guidelines for duplicate content indicate that the algorithm perceives these similar pages as  “deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic“.

By the way, these guidelines were [initially] updated March 20, 2011, less than a month after the [first] Panda algorithm update.

Systematic Process of Identifying and Addressing Duplicate Pages

If you are intimately familiar with your websites, like this search engine optimization consultant is, you already know which pages are similar and possibly causing duplicate content penalties. If you are an SEO agency taking on a new client with duplicate content issues, leaving it up to you to figure out where the duplicates are within their online properties, then you may need a few SEO tools to help identify possible duplicate pages.

UPDATES: Google Panda Filter Dates

• Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
• Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about  4 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011 (about 3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.51: October 9, 2011 (minor filter update about 2 weeks later)
• Panda Update 2.52: October 13, 2011 (minor filter update)
• Panda Update 3.0: October 19, 2011 (3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.1: November 18, 2011 (3 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.2: January 18, 2012 (8 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.3: February 28, 2012 (refresh to update index 6 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.4: March 23, 2012 (refresh to update index 3.5 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.5: April 19, 2012 (refresh to update index 4 weeks later)
• Panda Update 3.6: April 27, 2012 (refresh to update index 8 days later)

…continue reading this SEO article »

How the Demand Media Content Farm Works

If you are in the SEO business or work with a search engine optimization consultant, you’ve heard about the recent Google algorithm shift known as the Panda Algorithm update, Farmer update, or Content Farm update.

The big break on the story is in an interview between Cutts and Singhal of Google with Wired Magazine.

Here are the major take-aways as of now.

Little has been said about link farms.  The main issue seems to be your content, as apposed to your back links.  Scraper websites are those that automate content by republishing that which is already on other websites.  Content farms generate content with little value in order to capture search traffic.  Take a look at the info graphic about how the Demand Media content farm works [Source: OnlineMBA.com].

This is not a new issue.  Apparently, Google’s technology on how they filter, analyze and make decisions on duplicate content has changed.  As far as white-hat SEO, the rules are still the same.  The penalties just got a bit more serious.

…continue reading this SEO article »

When addressing duplicate content for SEO, the subject inevitably comes to 301 redirects and URL rewrites. However, what do you do when a client owns multiple websites and decides to combine websites into one domain, or eliminate a website domain?  If content is left live on the old domain, it will duplicate the content on the new domain.  Google may think the new domain is scraping content off the old domain and use the Panda filter to penalize the entire new domain.

The usual answer is… 301 redirect the old website to the new website.

But How Exactly?

Here’s the problem that always happens.  They end up redirecting the homepage from the old website to the homepage of the new website.  But what about all the interior pages?  There may be hundreds of back links to interior pages that get completely wasted as soon as the old website is deleted.  If you are hosting on a Microsoft IIs server, you may be limited without installing ISAPI or some other rewrite module. However, if you are hosting on an Apache server, the .htaccess file gives you an extremely flexible means of handling redirects.

…continue reading this SEO article »

Keyword density analyzer that actually lets you find the density of a particular keyword phrase on your site, compared to your competitor’s site. Most keyword density SEO tools just give you a list of words they find on the site and the particular webpage you request.

If you already know what keywords and phrases for which you want to rank, then the task is to reverse engineer those sites that rank at the top of the SERPs for your chosen keyword phrase.

This keyword density tool allows you to compare your keyword density of a phrase on your webpage against your competitor’s page who ranks above you.

However, beware of keyword stuffing…

…continue reading this SEO article »