When Google’s “Panda” Algorithm Collides with Duplicate Content

If you’re a Webmaster, it’s likely you’ve heard about the Google latest search algorithm — “Panda” — and all the benefits and implications of this update. Today, we wanted highlight what happens when Google Panda collides online with duplicate content. There have been plenty of opinions written about Google Panda and duplicate content, but we want to provide some background and examples to help you better understand how Panda and duplicate content might affect you.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one web page, within the same web site. When multiple pages within a web site contain essentially the same content, search engines such as Google can penalize/not display that site in any relevant search results.

Should you be Concerned?

When Google released Panda, there was a significant outcry from legitimate business and publishers who were either downgraded overnight in their search engine page rank or dropped all together. For many of the businesses, the Panda algorithm reduced SEO rank and decreased visitors, site revenue and online market awareness. Some websites even experienced damage to their brand, as their customers and prospects questioned whether they were still in business.

We’ve spoken with Cult of Mac, Digital Trends and several Fortune 1000 businesses, and they’ve all said the same thing: They were penalized and downgraded as a result of the Panda release as a result of unauthorized duplication of their content. They had done everything to comply with Google in optimizing their SEO configurations, but the third-party websites scraping and duplicating their content (outside of their control) caused their page ranks to fall.

Google’s Official Stance on Duplicate Content:

“We do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.”

“In rare situations, our algorithm may select a URL from an external site that is hosting your content without your permission. If you believe that another site is duplicating your content in violation of copyright law, you may contact the site’s host to request removal. In addition, you can request that Google remove the infringing page from our search results by filing a request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

Where is This “External” Duplicate Content Coming From?

Sometimes, it’s not clear how third-party sites obtain copies of legitimate work. Typically, they either steal it by manually or automatically scraping the content. The scraped content is then republished onto their sites, providing no credit or link to the original work.

What does that look like? It’s not difficult to find examples, but I tracked one down that seemed particularly ironic. Here’s an original article by PC World on Google’s War Against Scraper Sites:

Here’s a duplicate copy of the same story that doesn’t give any credit to the original PC World article:

It’s clear that we’re not looking at a coincidence here. The title, article content and images are all identical. The scraping site didn’t even attempt to mask their plagiarism with synonym changes. Why would they do that? Just take a look at the ads on the scraper site … They want to profit from the keywords and traffic driven by PC World’s content.

What Can You Do About It?

• Listen to Google
  Google provides a list of tips for using rel=”nofollow” and canonicalization to ensure they are able to identify you as the original author of content and avoid penalizing or downgrading your business’s search ranking results.
• Learn About DMCA and Use It
  If your content has already been duplicated by unauthorized publishers, you should learn more about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and how it can help get help remove your content from infringing websites. Two helpful resources to start learning the law and your rights are Google’s official DMCA policy page and the United States Copyright Office.
• Be Proactive About Stopping Scrapers
  We believe the best solution is to implement practices and or services to proactively prevent people or web scrapers from harvesting or scraping your content in the first place. Although web scrapers can be difficult to detect, there are tactics and/or services that can be implemented to limit certain behaviors on your website(s). Some of the quickest ways to make strides in the right direction are to implement rate limiting rules, to block traffic from blacklisted IP addresses and to use Captcha to help reduce automated web scrapers.

While none of these tactics are fool-proof ways to completely prevent your content from being duplicated, the more barriers to entry you have, the more difficult it will be for web scrapers to repeatedly duplicate your content. Distil built an enterprise-ready platform to monitor and prevent site scraping, so if you want some help in the protecting your content, try our our service. Whatever route you take, the key is to make sure that whatever tactics or services you implement, you don’t forget about your legitimate traffic … You don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Be proactive, but make sure you keep your priorities on the user-experience and quality of your site(s).

-Sean Harmer, Distil

SEO Goals and Key Indicators

Google’s Feb 2012 Update

Between February 25-28th Google rolled out another big set of changes to their algorithm. These changes knocked down a lot of short cuts that SEO companies were using, including blog networks. The red flags have been there for a long time. Blog networks are easy to uncover simply because of the complexity of trying to setup a truly diverse hosting environment. It is not just separate C-class IP addresses it is also registrars, DNS, admin login IP addresses, plug-in profiles, etc. There are so many easy ways to group sites as being related or identical that it is not worth the effort of trying to take short cuts with your linking. Instead focus on what is going to have a lasting impact on your SEO:

• Page Speed – Improve your code, increase your hardware, etc.
• Better Onsite Content
• Usability

These three factors will have a lasting impact on your SEO during 2012 and beyond.

Get Your Strategy Together

Successful internet marketing campaigns have one thing in common: Comprehensive strategies. Today’s marketplace makes it extremely difficult to compete in one area of internet marketing without complimenting that work in several other areas. For example, why invest in search engine optimization if you don’t have a quality website to convert the traffic to leads or sales? Why invest in a mobile app if you aren’t going to optimize the listing to generate a high volume of downloads? These examples show how a comprehensive strategy to internet marketing is the best approach for future success.

Fruition.net has been successful in this comprehensive approach by staying at the forefront of each individual strategy. At the core of these strategies is a collection of goals and key indicators we use to monitor, adjust, and track performance. Below you will find a few of the most important goals for each area of internet marketing.

Comprehensive Internet Marketing Strategies

Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website with the end goal of improving your ranking on the major search engines. Here are the goals and key indicators you should be tracking to evaluate the success of your SEO campaign:

• Keyword Rankings — This one is easy! Determine which keywords you think will generate more business, write them down, and track your rankings for each of them every month. Side note: Make sure you aren’t logged in to your Google account in order to receive unbiased results.
• Non-Branded Search Traffic — This is the traffic that has come to your website via the search engines, but the visitor did not use your brand name in their search. Your website should already be capturing the branded searches, so the real test is how much non-branded traffic your website is generating and increasing each month.
• Conversions — This is where the rubber meets the road. Increases in rankings and traffic are great, but ultimately these campaigns are all about generating new leads or revenue. We track phone calls, email inquiries, and revenue numbers for our clients to give them instant feedback on their marketing investment. Some clients take it a step further and track the leads via a CRM to produce a tangible return on investment.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is a quick method of generating an increase of traffic to your website. You are literally paying for each click, but watch out because your budget can quickly get away from you if you don’t know what you are doing. Here are the metrics you should be following to ensure a quality PPC campaign:

• Quality Score — When someone clicks on your PPC ad, you can direct them to any page on your website. It might be the home page or a specific landing page, but whichever page is chosen will be given a Quality Score (scale 1-10) by Google. This quality score measures the relevancy of the page as it relates to the PPC ad. The lower the relevancy, the higher the cost per click. Therefore, you want to make your landing page as relevant as possible and don’t advertise unless your landing page Quality Score is 5 or higher.
• Cost Per Conversion — This should be your #1 key indicator for tracking purposes. The cost per conversion measures the total cost it takes to generate a lead or sale. The beauty of this key indicator is that it encapsulates all of the moving parts of a paid search campaign: ad design, ad bidding, quality score, landing page design, landing page quality, landing page calls to action, etc.

Social Media
Social media has been a big buzz word for the past couple of years and for good reason. People are spending A LOT of time on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and the like. If you are going to compete online, then you need to at least have a presence with the major channels. Here are a couple ways to measure your effectiveness:

• Likes/Fans — This is an easy one to track. How many people like your business on Facebook or are following you on Twitter? The larger the number, the better. Search engines like to see a large following because they feel it represents authority and a leader of the industry.
• Shares/Retweets — There are free tools available that can provide you with the number of times your content has been shared or retweeted. Another case of bigger is better because it shows the people who are following you are engaged with your content.
• Google +1 — So far we have not seen a correlation between getting +1s and higher organic rankings. That has to change or it seems +1 will be considered a failure.

Website and Application Development
Building a new website or mobile application is a very detail oriented project that requires a well defined process. The best way to track the success of your campaign is make sure your process is well documented with dates attached to each of your deliverables of the project. The time spent up front in the planning stages will bring clarity to the project for all involved and help the project stay on task. Below is a platform that can be built into a very detailed list of deliverables for a development project:

• Define the Scope of the Project
1. Project Management
2. Calendar of the project
3. Resources needed (human capital, scheduling, technical proficiency, etc)
4. Wireframes for the user interface (mapping the visitor flow)
5. Approvals
• Creative – Design Work
1. Logos and branding
2. Image and video content
3. Clear calls to action
4. Concepts presented to clients
5. Revisions as necessary
6. Client Approvals
• Coding and Development
1. Hosting environment
2. Platform development
3. Installation of all scripts, APIs, tracking, etc
• Testing
1. Cross browser testing
2. Bug fixing
• Optimization
1. Titles
2. Headers
3. Descriptions
4. Alt Tags
5. Content

Internet marketing is a rapidly changing marketplace. Employing several complimentary strategies and monitoring the performance will provide you with the greatest opportunity for success. Good luck in 2012 and may all of your internet marketing strategies come to Fruition!

-Jonathan Mills, Fruition

The New Number One Spot: Planning for the Future of SEO

You run a successful business, or at least the IT for a successful business — that’s why you’re on SoftLayer. And, chances are, you’ve already spent lots of time and effort optimizing your site for search engines. You’ve built backlinks; you’ve ensured the structure of your site allows the search engine spiders to see every page of the site and prevents the creation of duplicate content; you’ve carefully written titles, friendly URLs and header tags; and you’ve continuously tweaked your on-page content to get to the number one spot in Google, Bing and other search engines.

Unfortunately, that apical spot is quickly becoming an apocryphal one; being number one isn’t what is used to be. The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has undergone dramatic changes in the past few years, and even if you optimize perfectly and grab the top spot, you might be pushed down (even below the fold) by a variety of other Google products:

• Ads & Comparison Ads
• Local Results
• Image Results
• Video Results
• Shopping Results

In today’s SEO market, you need to optimize not only for regular web results, but for every other Google product too. Luckily, there are a few tips you can use to make sure you appear in those products, and get the new and improved global number one spot—and lots of traffic too.

Local
Does your business have any local presence? Or do you ever see yourself buried under lots of local results, even when you have great SEO? Optimizing your local presence can fix that, and it’s a pretty simple task. If Google already ranks you well, then it considers your site to be a high quality site. You just need to make sure it also considers your site to be a local one as well.

To let the search engines know you want to rank locally, follow these four steps:

1. Add your company address to the footer of your page. Use the address Google already has on file for you. (If you tell customers that you are located at “1156 6th Avenue” and Google has you listed at “1156 Avenue of the Americas,” use the latter.
2. Embed a Google map on your contact us page. Find your company on Google Maps, then click the link icon on the top right of the map. You’ll see an option to “Customize the Embedded Map.” Pick the size that works for you and add it to your site.
3. If you haven’t already, claim your Google Places account at http://www.google.com/placesforbusiness
4. Lastly, build more links. I know you’ve already built a lot of relevant, quality links, but now you need relevant, quality local links, so make sure you’re linked to from local portals, yellow pages and local directories.

Images
If your customers are often looking for images – of your products, of your content or anything on else on your site – or if your results are pushed down by image results, you need to take the extra step of optimizing your images. Ignore what you’ve heard before about alt tags and image titles; we’ll share some of the real steps to take to make sure your images rank too.

As we saw with local SEO, ranking for images isn’t about doing special SEO for images as much as it is about doing great traditional SEO, and letting Google know your images are there … and that you want to rank for them in Google Images and in Universal Search results. The first – and more important – step for ensuring that your images rank is making sure the page on which that image is found is perfectly optimized. Next, focus on these steps:

1. The most important image-specific optimization technique is ensuring that the name of the image contains the word or phrase you are optimizing for. Is it a picture of your West Coast data center? Call it “west-coast-data-center.jpg” instead “DC76182687.jpg.”
2. The next most important element is the content surrounding the image (or images) in question. That data center picture will rank well if it’s on a page all about your data center locations – and particularly well if it’s embedded right in the middle of a paragraph about your West Coast data center. It won’t do very well in a slideshow with a one-line caption beneath it.
3. You can highlight the images you particularly want Google to rank well in Universal/Image results by adding those images to your XML Sitemap. Inside the tag, add the following lines for each image you want to highlight:
   <image:image>
   <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>

Google recently improved its image duplicate filter. Buying lots of stock images? Then it might be harder to rank for those images. But if you have original images, then great! You have a leg up on your competitors.

Video
Got any videos on your site? Then you definitely want to implement the steps below to make sure Google recognizes those videos and ranks them highly. If you do, any page that has a video will get a thumbnail in the SERPs and you’ll show up in Google Video search. You’ll also be given an incredible, unfair advantage: if there are two videos on a page, Google likes to group them together; if you’re the lower video, you’ll automatically be pulled up the SERP to be next to the higher video.

As we saw with images, your first step is great optimization of the page on which the video resides. That means ensuring the video isn’t alone on the page; try to add other textual content – comments, transcripts, context – alongside the video. This is especially important for video, since Google just interprets the video on the already well-optimized page, instead of ranking video separately on the SERP. You just need to let Google know you have a video.

1. The first step to letting Google know about your video is actually having a video on your site, and fully owning and hosting that video. Embedding a YouTube video on your page – even if you filmed and produced it, and it’s on your channel – is not enough. You need to host both the video (the .swf file) and the video player (the .flv file). If you use a service like BrightCove to host and play your videos, make sure to set up a CNAME from your domain to BrightCove’s, to prove to the engines that the videos really are yours. This applies to images as well.
2. Once you are hosting the video, you need to tell Google that the video is there. You can either set up a video sitemap, an XML file similar to your XML Sitemap, that tells the engines where it can find videos on your site and some information about those videos—including where the thumbnail image is, the title of the video, a description and some more optional information. If you can’t put together a video sitemap, you can add some meta information to your page, called micro formats, that will let Google know there’s a video on that page. The two accepted formats are Facebook Share and RDFa.
3. Lastly, make sure the URL of the page that contains the video is less than 70 characters. Any more and Google might truncate the URL. If they do that, they won’t show the thumbnail, even if you’ve followed the above two steps.

You may have noticed a theme here: Good SEO combined with following a few special steps to make sure Google knows which special category you are trying to rank for translates into great Universal SEO. Follow these steps, and you’re sure to get the real #1 spot … And if you want a little help getting the “good SEO” piece done, you can always use Drive, the only SEO software designed to optimize for Universal, rich-media SEO to help. For more information about our business and what we do, check out the RankAbove page in the SoftLayer Marketplace.

If this information is helpful and you want to hear more, leave a comment, and I’ll start working on a follow up with tips for Google Shopping, Google News and more. To tide you over, you can click through a presentation about blended search from October:

- Eli Feldblum, RankAbove

Ranking Well != Being Well Ranked

There is a common misconception in Search Engine Optimization: That if Company A was just on the first page for some random keyword, the sky would open up and leads would fall from the heavens. This is not always the case, and a better place to start the process of deciding what Key Words will be most effective for a client to rank for can be assessed in 3 easy steps:

1. In depth keyword analysis for terms that your customers actually use to find a business like yours. If you specialize in DUI law, keywords structured around your area of expertise will lead to a higher quality of lead than the search term, “Denver Attorney.”
2. Be realistic about who your competitors are and find where they are ranking organically. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. This will give you a good road map for what your competitors are doing and they are creating success.
3. If you have a physical location make sure your local maps listings for Google, Yahoo and Bing are optimized and Owner Verified. The Search Engines want to show your business to Searchers that are in your Geographic area..Please let them!

Once you have gone through those three easy steps, make sure that the SEO company you are working with has the same expectations that you have for your business. Targeted success metrics and milestones need to be at the core of your SEO strategy. Ranking for 50 Keywords that bounce at 90% will not result in more customers through your door. It is very important that the SEO firm you use has your business objectives in mind. If not you may find yourselves three or six months down the road having a very uncomfortable conversation about what success is.

If you’ve never made a concerted effort into SEO and SEM strategy, we’d be happy to share some of the tools we’ve developed to get you ranking well whether you consider yourself a local business or a national one. Head over to http://nativerank.com/ to see a few of our products in action and learn a little more about our service.

-Winston Cook, Native Rank