As I am sure you can all understand and appreciate, the mold surrounding my business is not completely based on the facts about SEO, but years of experience, trial and error and filing away "secretes of the trade" in which I can not just give away or there would not be a need for having us do your SEO. With that said, I will answer the majority of most commonly asked questions in this Educational Series, but more so on the factual side things rather then covering all aspects of exactly what we do for each of our clients. I will start with the questions asked thru out the week in my previous post, then get into a few other more commonly asked questions that we receive on almost a daily basis.
Duplicate Content is fairly self-explanatory, but Google defines it as the following:
"Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin."
One of the most common questions I get asked is "When i use a sponsors RSS Feed, can I change a cpl of words with in the post and make the content original?" The answer: Yes and No. Yes, your exact text is not word for word in comparison to the aggregator , but No, you are most likely not original enough to out-smart Google. That's where the "Appreciably Similar" falls into play. If you want to rank well for your individual post pages as well as the Index it's self, write original unique quality keyword rich text. I can not express the importance of this enough.
Now, there are exceptions to the rule. I have a blog in which I syndicate the news about a specific "Sports Icon" and though all of my content is directly pulled from over 30 "news sources", I give credit to each of the sources of original content thru not only canonical tags (rel="canonical"), but thru direct links to the source. Google has given me credit for having all of the news in 1 place while not trying to take credit for the content, thus for my site has been classified as "Informative" rather then "Dupe". When adding in the proper On-Site and Off-Site SEO to this site, it's the reasoning for the success in SE rankings it receives.
When you have a large site, or you have developed a method of internal linking, be sure to keep it consistent and use "canonicalization" to indicate your preferred URL.
EXAMPLE:
Do not link Site.com/porn-videos and Site.com/porn-videos/ and Site.com/porn-videos/index.html , choose one of the 3 preferably site.com/porn-videos and stick with that url thru out your site.
In reality, both mainstream and adult require pretty much the same aspects when it comes to proper optimization On-Site. In regards to off-site, Adult has limitations that mainstream does not have. Examples of benefits mainstream brings would include top level directories listings, backlink.. opportunities (related content pr8 sitewide links for example), branding opportunities in regards to time spend on site, pages viewed, etc that comes from digital and print media ads which increases type-in traffic, etc. All though both mainstream and adult will always have steady competition, you will run into alot more black hat methods with adult then mainstream, and adult is spidered more frequently due to not only the SERP cheater/spammers, but the amount of Illegal Content that gets used in adult. If you pay attention to the top 10 results for a large variety of "Mainstream Keywords", you will see little movement in positions in comparison to paying attention to the "Adult Keyword" results. Adult sites are the only sites that we have seen people rank #4 today and #84 tomorrow, then back to #12 day 3.. etc. Our mainstream clients seem to fluctuate 1, 2, maybe 3 positions day to day, but never 50+ positions, the back down 34, then back up 12.. and again, this is due to a variety of aspects that i could spend all day discussing, but going to move on to the next question below.
Google analytics can be your best friend when it comes to SEO, especially when combined with Google Webmaster Tools. Analytics is going to give you alot of the information you need to determine what doing well, and what's not. Focus on your Traffic, Page's Viewed, Time Spent on Site, Bounce Rate and in some cases, % of New Visits.
With each of the aspects above, you can view not only your traffic sources, but your Search Engines and Keywords.
Traffic Sources - Your bounce rate can drastically effect your rankings. If you do alot of trades, and you notice that Site.com is bringing you 22,000 uniques a day, but your bounce rate from Site.com is 95%, this is not good
. Now, we are talking about SEO... if you are just after traffic, do your thing, but if your focused on ranking well on the SERPS, that 95% bounce is going to hurt you and you need to consider either making a change, or dropping the trade all together.
Google has 100's of employees who job is to soley focus on indexing sites faster, and providing quality results faster. The most recent feature Google has launched is the "Instant" results. As most of you have seen, Adult has been excluded from the instant results Algo. If you Google "Sex" it will start to show "Mainstream" Sex Offender type results, but as soon as you add another keyword such a porn, videos, etc, the results vanish. Now, do another search for Sex once again noticing the Sex Offenders "Instant Results", but then click Search and you will get "Adult" related listings. There is alot of speculations about SEO and instant results, but below is what we have found to be the case for "Mainstream" instant results:
Standard SEO methods need to remain in play as always. When it comes to "Instant Results", we are noticing as well as other SEO firms we have spoke with since the launch, that Instant Results are either random based on how common keyword is your searching for, or the most updated results for a "hot topic".
Example: Do a search for Charlie Sheen, and you will see News Results #1 in "Instant Search", but as soon as you add 1 space behind his name, it brings up his IMDB and Wikipedia as #1 and #2.. so any variation to any search will draw separate results then the first.
It is too early to determine how to maximize on the "Instant Search" function, and up to this date, Google has not commented on whether or not they are going to include Adult into the algo, which brings concerns though full understandable as to why they are avoiding it.
My personal opinion would be that a new directory such as Adult.Google.com or Google.com/Adult will come into play at some point (AGAIN, this is my opinion, no proof), but age verification would be required to access the features that section would provide. We all hope his is not the case, but Google is in complete control and the only thing we can do is adapt.
Large Websites = Huge Opportunities (More indexed pages means more traffic)
Large Websites =
Proper On-Site Optimization more so then smaller sites to avoid various factors including duplicate content, 404's, unexpected spamming (comments, etc.) Using Syntax to pull various keywords into each of your pages will save you a ton of time and headaches as you grow.
Large Websites = Full Time SEO requirements
Most important factors:
- Proper Internal Linking (refer back to the cananicol linking)
- Deep Linking - assuming your site is properly optimized and you have SE friendly URL's
- Sitemaps (both php/html and XML) - Keep it up to date and submit them to the major search engines
- Bread Crumbs- i get alot of arguments about this, but trust me when I tell you, letting the surfer recall how he/she got to a certain place with in your site will keep your statics in order when it comes to pages viewed and time spent on site. It also avoids have a consistent frequency in your most common "exit" page. (YES, Google looks at this as much as everything else).
- Keyword Rich and Properly Tagged Categories