by Sozo Firm Staff on October 19, 2009
It’s always enlightening to carry out a variety of experiments that relate to our world of search engine optimization. Many of our experiments have been related to duplicate content & differentiation strategies. We’ve also been forerunners, we like to believe, with experiments regarding site wide anchor links and footer link positioning.
What effect does adding a NoFollow to a crucial outbound link have?
Our latest experiment relates to a relatively new business website based out of York, PA. The site had difficulty ranking for some prime geographic + keyword searches even after a local marketing firm invested a reasonably fair amount of time & energy (so they say) into promoting the site.
Without any intention of using their site as an experiment, we added a naturally placed geographic + keyword rich text link within an informative article on one of our trusted websites, and, within 2 1/2 weeks, this particular business website was ranking in the top 2 or top 3 organic searches for relevant geographic + keyword searches (one phrase has 12.5 million results in Google). Pretty impressive. Even I was a bit caught off guard by how easy (it seemed) to get this non client website ranking well, at least for the short term. Running backlink queries, we were able to determine that it was, indeed, our link to this business website which was causing the sudden boost in SERP positioning.
Since this business website is owned by a company which is not a client of ours, and since this backlink to them was offered generously to them with no notification to them on our behalf (it was merely within an editorial article, and they probably were never aware that the link even existed), I decided that it was time to conduct an experiment. Today, we added a “nofollow” to the link to their website within the editorial article. We plan to regularly check the SERPs to see how long it takes for a “nofollow” tag to have an impact on this website’s ranking. Based on past studies we’ve conducted, the results can take quite some time.
On a side note, it’s scary to think of how much economical impact removing or adding a link can have on a third party business. Welcome to the 21st century where millionaires are made through merely a well positioned link or two, oftentimes created by an unknowing third party.
by Sozo Firm Staff on July 21, 2009
The million dollar question: When is duplicate content not considered duplicate content by major search engines?
Grounds for importance: Virtually identical pages are basically ignored by Google and are of little, if any, value in terms of promoting your brand, products & website through SEO.
Duplicate Content Curiosity Killed the Cat
Answer: Without dropping names, I’ve read studies conducted by name brand optimizers working with large (read: million page +) websites who have been successful “bypassing” Google’s duplicate content filters by merely altering punctuation. Personally, I believe that punctuation changes are a temporary fix as I don’t think it is too difficult for them to be ignored (if not already).
I typically recommend clients who are persistent on launching virtually identical sites (such as for affiliates or daughter companies) to strive for a bare minimum of one textual change for every ten words of content on a site. My more comfortable preference, however, would be two words out of ten.
At Sozo Firm, we’ve done many differentiation studies down through the years. A differentiation study is when multiple pages or multiple sites are built relying on practically identical templates and content. Content and coding is slightly modified (sometimes over time) and search results are regularly monitored to see how the sites perform.
I’ll throw you four similar site examples in a recent differentiation study:
Wholesale flash drives: This site performs exceptionally well; of course, a prime reason is due to the popularity of that search phrase. Even so, considering the relatively weak content (from a unique textual perspective) on the site, this site’s performance has pleasantly surprised me.
Preloaded flash drives: While the organic search traffic is meager on this phrase, this site, through the application of differentiation principles, has also pleasantly surprised me with its ranking in SERPs and ability to generate proposal requests.
Promotional flash drives: This site has performed – apparently, at least – the worst of the initial three sites (wholesale, preloaded & promotional). While inbound links have a major factor, of course, the primary reason for this site’s minimal input into the client’s RFPs comes directly from the strong competitiveness of this search: “promotional flash drives.” There is fairly significant traffic on that phrase as well as several other stronger sites with aged organic positions.
Today, in continuation of this interesting differentiation study, we did two things. First, we launched a fourth altered copycat one pager site targeting the phrase computer flash drives coupled with the plan to further strengthen these one pager micro marketing sites by adding a second page of partially unique or altered textual content. Preloaded flash drives is the only one pager micro site so far to be expanded to the dual pager status.
Of course, there are many additional factors which are affecting this particular differentiation study which are not being addressed in this brief blog post. Some of those factors are directly attributed to inbound links to the above sites from other sites (including this blog post). Other factors are not discussed because, well, we’re an SEO company and, while we occasionally share some somewhat technical information, we just don’t want to spill the beans! But, having tossed those gray line waivers at you, please feel free to drop a comment or pop an email our way sharing your thoughts on what we’ve termed differentiation theory: how different must a duplicate website be before Google treats it as a non duplicate (or partially duplicate) website?
