duplicate content penalties – Blend SEO

SEO Tools & Process to Fix Google Panda Penalty

Gregory Lee — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 07:02:16 +0000

Updated: December 26, 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)
This has become crazy to update. Just check the SEOMoz Google Algorithm Change History.

To determine if your website fell victim to a Panda filter, check your traffic. Panda “penalizes” your website by dropping your rankings, not just on pages with duplicate or thin content, but universally across your website – including your homepage. If you were hit by the Panda Filter, you will see a significant traffic drop on one of the dates above. Subsequently, if you address the issue, your traffic should be adjusted the next time the Panda filter runs. Each time the filter runs, it updates the Google index.
Update: February and March 2012 updates were merely when the Panda Filter was run again in order to refresh the Google index, so that changes made to websites will be reflected in Google. In other words, if you implemented fixes to get out of the Panda Filter before February 28 or March 23, you can check traffic at those dates to see if your fixes did the trick.

Identify Duplicate Content

This paid tool makes your process simple, but costs money. Copyscape is a tool for finding copyright and plagiarism offenders. Since Google generally penalizes the copier and not the original author, plagiarism is not an SEO issue. For this reason CopyScape is not a regular part of the SEO arsenal of tools. Don’t ask me why as an SEO I even know about it, but I’ve known about it for years (guess that’s part of the multidisciplinary Blend SEO approach).

The process to identifying duplicate pages is, using the paid version called CopySentry, you can feed it your non-penalized website and let it find the duplicate content out there amidst your penalized websites.

Using free tools takes a little more time and effort. Download and install A1 Sitemap Generator, a great sitemap generator program with a fully functional free 30 day trial.

Run a scan of your penalized website. It will generate a list of pages of the website, ignoring those blocked by robots.txt, following any redirects or canonical tags – meaning you have a list of webpages that spiders crawl.
Among the sitemap output choices, you can create a text file list of page URLs with each URL on a separate line.
Paste this list into excel and start your search for duplicate content. Use your intuition and Google to check blocks of text. If a different website ranks number one for any block of text, that website is credited as the originator. Mark this URL and the originator URL.

Test or Check Duplicate Content

Once you have a list of pages from your penalized website and their counterpart on the originator website, you will want to check their similarity. Are they similar enough to require a rewrite? Run the URLs through a webpage comparison or duplicate content checker tool. After you go through several pages between two sites, you will eventually get a feel for where the cut-off is for rewrite verses no rewrite. Any pages with similarity higher than your cut-off require a writer to take a look for the duplicate or similar language. Similar content on the penalized website must be completely rewritten.

Update: Unfortunately, my favorite duplicate content diagnostic tool has been abandoned.
This first similarity tool is my favorite. Some only give a single percentage, letting you wonder how much of that similarity is due to non-visible code. This tool tells you, without inundating you with too much information. There’s no captcha, so checking through your list is quick. I embedded the form below, so you can try it here.
Duplicate Content Check

This next tool, embedded below simply gives you a single percentage. Depending on the template between your penalized and originator websites, the number you get will seem pretty low. My cut-off with this tool was about 10%. Anything over 10%, required a copywriter to rewrite the page or at least a section of the page.

This comparison SEO tool by SEO Book compares the page titles, meta information, and common phrases occurring on different pages.

Here are several more alternatives you can try.

The post SEO Tools & Process to Fix Google Panda Penalty appeared first on Blend SEO.

Landing Pages, Not Just For PPC. Hello SEO.

Gregory Lee — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 20:25:05 +0000

Do you create landing pages for your PPC ads?

Do You want to maximize their SEO benefit?

Being raised with a thrifty mindset and borderline hoarding tendencies, I am compelled to use every website asset to further SEO success. This article will reveal to you:

How to know if your landing pages are causing duplicate content for organic search engines
How to eliminate duplicate content penalties
How to reclaim unused back links
Long term strategy to build organic traffic using your paid search landing pages

Are Your Paid Search Landing Pages Causing Duplicate Content Penalties?

A lot of clients don’t realize that their PPC landing pages end up in the search engine index. If your landing pages have nearly identical content as each other or other pages of your website, they will potentially cause duplicate content penalties without you realizing. Your website will not completely drop out of the search results, but those individual pages will waste resources (link authority, PageRank, crawl budget) that should go into other areas. And, Google will remember that your website has useless duplicate pages, which affects your website’s overall profile. Over the years Google has told us to disallow, redirect and apply canonical links to those pages. Depending on how you address duplicate pages can hold back your potential for Google PageRank and high search engine rankings.

Check Google for your landing pages by searching…

site:yourwebsite.com/landingpage.php

A lot of times I find duplicate versions of the same landing page in Google or Bing, the only difference being different strings in the URL. The URL may have some random looking string at the end such as ?src=W4THMJHWWZRP. Because these have different URLs, the search engines assume they are supposed to be different pages. They may have identical content with only slight differences. Unfortunately, search engines are penalizing you for duplicate content in the organic results. You can turn this around to your advantage!

So the first thing you’re probably wondering is how do these pages find their way into the Google or Bing index? You don’t have any links to them, they are complete islands, pages hosted on your server with no links from any part of your website. So how does Google find them?

Easy… someone else landed on the page from your PPC ad and created a link to the page.

Here’s the proof. Once you find a page in a search index using the “site” search above, check that page for backlinks. Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and enter the URL for the page. Make sure you click “Inlinks” and chose the drop down “Except from this domain”. Here you will see other websites that link to that landing page.

How to Eliminate Duplicate Content Penalties

Some people would say to use your robots.txt file to disallow search engines from listing those pages in their results. For a long time, this has been the standard way of addressing duplicate content. However, there is always the potential for other websites to link to your landing pages. Even if you don’t see back links in Yahoo Site Explorer, there may still be back links not shown (search engines just refuse to show you everything they know and there’s nothing we can do about it), you need to plan on the possibility of people creating links in the future. Using the robots.txt to disallow a page with potential back links does not let you take advantage of potential back links.

How to Regain Unused Back Links

Every back link you have is one more that your competitor may not. With organic search engine optimization, there are so many factors not under your control. With all the competing websites each with their individual approach to outrank you, the only way to maximize your success is to make the best use of everything under your control. You can’t force other websites to link to you. If they do link to you, take credit for them all.

Instead of using robots.txt to disallow pages with potential back links, use the canonical tag. The canonical tag can point the back link PageRank to a page intended for organic search engine ranking.

Implementing the canonical tag is something you can do right away with very little effort.

First figure out which landing pages would be considered duplicate content. If you use the same content and only change out a keyword or two, those should be considered duplicates.
Next choose a page to represent the duplicates. This will be your organic landing page. It may be a page already on your website that your PPC landing pages are patterned after. Or if your paid landing pages are written differently from any of your organic website, it may be one of your paid landing pages. You may end up with several groups of duplicate pages where each group has its own representative organic page.
Place the canonical tag in the head section of each duplicate landing page. The canonical tag on each landing page will point to its organic representative. Code for the canonical tag looks like this:

With the canonical tags in place, all your actual and potential back link authority is transferring to preferred organic landing pages.

Strategy to Build Organic Traffic Using Paid Search Landing Pages

As you have time, page by page, you can build out these duplicate pages into powerful organic search landing pages. We will assume duplicate landing pages are targeting different paid search campaigns. Content for these pages are slightly different in that they aim to convert a different audience, whether it be based on keyword search, geographic area, time of day, etc. Let’s assume you did a great landing web page design which may follow this example from John Saddington at Church Create.

Your headlines and content above the fold should be customized for the specific audience. Since this is slightly different from an existing organic landing page, we will optimize this page to target a variation of that existing page. We will turn this marginally different page into a completely different page without affecting is as a paid landing page. The areas we have to work with include:

Title tag
Meta description tag
Content below the fold

Define the theme of this page and choose your targeted keyword phrase(s). Create an optimized title tag and description. Make your keyword phrase(s) prominent in the title. Gear your description to convert your target audience, but be sure to include your keyword phrases here too.

Below your current content, write out 200 or more words of optimized content. Keep the code for this text simple. 200-400 words of text should not add noticeable load time to the page. Human visitors may or may not scroll down to read the text, but search engines will definitely read it. This should be highly optimized with excellent information geared toward or even about the target audience. This text can be used to further qualify the audience. Talk about their interests and problems. Break the text apart into paragraphs with H2 coded sub-headings.

Once your content is complete, remove the canonical tag and add this page to your sitemap. Create links to this page from other pages of the site. If appropriate, link to this page from your navigation.

Enjoy free traffic on this paid search landing page. By tackling these pages one by one, you can make transforming your paid landing pages into organic landing pages a long term strategy.

The post Landing Pages, Not Just For PPC. Hello SEO. appeared first on Blend SEO.