Shay Amar Blog » Search Engine Optimization

The legit way to void duplicate content

Shay Amar — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:05:40 +0000

For years affiliate marketers and website owners have to follow some restricted rules in order to avoid what so called duplicated content.

Duplicate content is a term that refers to a situation where the same webpage content can be found in several places over the net. Search engines like Google developed algorithms in their efforts to handle this situation.

It all started when people realized the power of search engines organic traffic as a way to generate money. They started to spam the network with content in order to get as many indexed paged. It is much easier to duplicate content with minor changes rather to generate unique valuable content. So not only that the search engines results become less relevant but they also had to deal with a huge amount of pages to process.

When Google first came out with the duplicated content algorithm there were some legit websites that suffer from it. In one night they lose major part of their organic traffic.
Websites owners had to adapt to the new situation while taking into consideration some serious restriction in terms of the user experience. Take for example a typical e-commerce website. This kind of websites usually contains thousands of products. Usually within the product page you will find only few sentences about the product and lots of other content that can easily be found on the other products pages. Is this is a case of a duplicated content?

The personalization approach that PPC marketers are using were always relying on minor changes in the landing page. Search engines will consider it as a duplicate content while there is no doubt that this approach increase sales.

Its endless struggle while website owners want to make more money from their website while search engines don’t like when someone is trying to trick their search results pages.

As of few months ago there is a legit solution that supposes to help both the search engines and the website owners. Live search has partner with Google and Yahoo to support a new tag that will help websites to tell search engine about the situation (Partnering to help solve duplicate content issues)

The following is an example on how you can use the new tag:

The use of it is very simple. Suppose you have a set if pages that looks like

Now you can tell the search engine that those pages are based on a different page:

Please note that for now Live Search will not consider this tag as a command but as a hint. This is mainly to allow a period of time that they can test its implementation and to avoid any abuse of it.

When Search Engine Start to Send Organic Traffic

Shay Amar — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:58:53 +0000

When I launch an affiliate campaign I am trying to look ahead. One of the things that I’ve learned during the years is to develop my own website rather to use direct linking.

I do use direct link in rare occasions, mostly for seasonal products. But even for seasonal campaign eventually I do develop a website for it.

Few days ago Yahoo started to send organic traffic for one of my niche affiliate website. I launched this website only 4 months ago. For now it is not a heavy traffic, approximately 70 users a day. The thing is that I am getting a free traffic for one of the keywords that convert very well. So the outcome is simple, I double the profit margin because with PPC I had close to 100% ROI now I don’t have to pay for it and…. I am getting more traffic for this keyword because people tend to click on the organic search results much more than on the PPC ads.

I know some affiliate marketers that doing only PPC and not doing any SEO. They don’t like the idea of been ranked high on the first page of the search engine results without the confidence to know if their website will be still be their tomorrow.

It’s true; your website ranking can be changed without a notice. However I found that if you do SEO, less chance that you will get a slap with your PPC campaign.

A tip: If you would like to keep your ranking high on the search engines result page give your users a reason to mention your website elsewhere on the web. As long as the number of backlinks to your website consistently increase a good chance that you will not loose you’re ranking even if they do not use the right keywords as the anchor text.

Google Launches NoFollow Google Help Center

Shay Amar — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:23:32 +0000

Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines link Google that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It was first introduced by Google in 2005. Since then many SEO expert keep talk about it and the way Google use it.

Only lately Google launches a nofollow help center especially for the nofollow topic.
If you ever wondered about the benefit of backlinks you should read Google’s documentations about this topic.

For years I’ve been monitoring all of the backlinks to my website using SEO Elite.
It gives me the ability to see in one single screen shot all the backlinks to my website: if they are still active and if they have a nofollow attribute.

A link to a website can be considered as a vote. When someone link to your website the link is been interpreted by the search engine as a vote of credibility. If a link to your website includes the nofollow attribute, according to Google nofollow help center it almost useless. A backlink with the nofollow attribute will not help your website ranking.

Keep monitor after your backlinks. It’s fundamental in the SEO routine.

The impact of web page files extensions

Shay Amar — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:52:59 +0000

What should I use: .php, .asp, .html or .htm.
The answer is simple: it doesn’t matter at all !!!

I hear people talking about the preferred file extension to a website pages. Which extension has the most impact on the page ranking? If you are a newbie you will find it hard to believe, but this kind of talks are usually made by those who try to create a market. They try to convince you that there is a different and you should listen to their advice unless you don’t want your website to get a high ranking. And… to hear all about it you should purchase their e-book to get much deeper about the differences.

Let’s see how I can save you some time and money.

Before talking about your website ranking let’s see what each of those files represents:
html and htm are the extensions of an html file. Usually people consider this extension as a static html file. This assumption is not necessarily correct. I will explain this point later on. Php and Asp are extension of server-side HTML embedded scripting language. Each file extension is been handled by a different engine. It’s very important to underhand this point because it will affect on your website deployment. For example most of the Linux servers based hosting providers do not support Asp scripting.

Both engines (PHP and ASP) generate html format in spite of the differences with their file extension. Your browser was designed to deal with html format no matter how they were generated.

When a search engine crawl your website pages, Php, Asp or html file extension, he is “reading” html in the same way as your browser does.

In the old days, search engines gave a high score to pages with html file extension because back then you knew for sure that those are static web pages. A different score was given mainly because webmasters used server-side HTML embedded scripting language to generate pages dynamically. They wanted to fake a situation like their website contains lots of web pages. Back than it was a way to get a high ranking to your website.

As technology moves on, the apache web server mod_rewrite module was released. At that point the rules have been changed. With the mod_rewrite model you can rewrite each URL on your website to a different URL. For example, www.yourdomain.com/index.php?productid=4837 can be rewrite to www.yourdomain.com/sony-playstation.html . Meaning: if a visitor will visit both of the URLs he will see the same content. Using this technique you can generate static like web pages and expose only them.

Search engines like Google had to fight back. They did it very simple. The lower the score of what could be a static page.

What’s good about mod_rewrite module is that it gives you the ability to structure URLs with meaningful keywords. It looks better than a URL with variety of parameters and it might help with the page quality score. Based on my experience the added value of this technique is very small if any at all. Let’s say that the title tag of each web page has much more effective SEO contribution.

A tip: The most important SEO effort that you can do is a good content to your visitors. If they like what they see on your website they will come back and might even tell about to their friends. It’s the most reliable way to make your website grew. Those issues are on the far edge of the SEO efforts you should bother yourself with.

The effectiveness of backlinks to your website ranking.

Shay Amar — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:26:26 +0000

In the last few weeks I found myself talking with many webmasters about the effectiveness of backlinks. As Google keep updating their algorithm there is a common belief that links are no longer effective as they use to be in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). My answer was and still remains that same: To my opinion each webmaster should get backlinks to his website, and as many that he or she can get.

Backlinks has always been part of Google algorithm and probably will remain for a long time. However, I agree that each backlink is been rated by great number of rules. More than that, as the time moves on the number of rules is increasing. You can’t blame Google for trying to get their hand on those who are trying to trick their algorithm as I don’t blame those webmasters who are eager to see their website at the top of the SERP (Search Results Page).

Unless you are part of Google search engine R&D department, you probably can’t really tell much about the effectiveness of reciprocal link vs. one way link. I am guessing that probably most of them can’t answer that question as well.

Google can’t ignore backlinks neither webmasters. Google can’t ignore backlinks because it’s the core of their algorithm. They keep updating their rules in order to protect the visitors from gets abused by those who are looking to gain a fast easy money out of Google traffic.

As part of Google’s efforts to rate links there is a different between reciprocal links, three ways link and the smarty links.
As for the last link type I will dedicated a full post very soon. But it doesn’t matter how you name it, the most effective link to your website is one way link. Again… the others are still doing their SEO job, but not as the one way backlink.

Consider a backlink as a vote to a website. If another webmaster links to your website he is actually voting for it. If it’s a text link then he is also tell a litter story about your website. All of this information is been read by the search engine crawlers. This data is been analyzed in order to determine what is the best phrases that describes your website.

I have many website. Most of their traffic is organic. I don’t care much from where I am getting backlink or their nature for two main reasons:

A link to my website is always good from a traffic point of view. When someone link to my website there is a chance that someone actually will click on it. Not surprising that webmasters are keep forgets those basics. I don’t talk about a link from a links farms. If a Sony style website link to my blog I really don’t care. Especially if I get it for free. It’s probably a poor link from SEO point of view but could be a great link from traffic point of view. 10,000 poor links like that and Google will not be able to ignore them. It’s not a theory; it’s a fact for one of my website.
My big concern is about quality traffic to my websites. If I have the opportunity to get that kind of traffic I will get it. No matter if it will be a reciprocal link, three way link or one way link. As long the traffic is good to my website I will do the best in my power to get it.

Work on your links to your website is a reasonable way and don’t be surprised that Google and the rest will join to the party. It can take time. No doubt about it. But…. you can speed the process. There are good examples in the market about those who managed to do a big buzz out of their website. For those it took around three months to be at the top of the SERP. It’s not easy but reachable.