Eliminate Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is enemy N#1 of your on page optimization and it does hurt your web site in the search engine rankings, for this same purpose I wrote a post how to avoid duplicate content on wordpress with a wordpress hack that needs to be placed near the loop of the index.

Think about search engines as lazy robots that do not like to think, or rather, simply think about search engine spider bots as programmed robots (which they are) that take commands and execute them. Usually when we try to seo optimize our website the first thing we think about is ranking higher in the SERPs with our homepage, which is not bad at all, if we rank for generic keywords. For example it would make sense if this seo blog ranks very well in the SERPs of search engines for keywords “SEO” “Search Engine Optimization” “SEO Blog” “Learn SEO” “SEO Optimization” or even for “SEO tutorials”, but that is because this is a general SEO blog on which I run seo experiments and post about the results, or simply share my experience with search engine optimization that I had on the past. Now if this blog was not just a “seo informations” blog but I was going to offer seo services such as directory submission, seo consulting, seo review and reports or even seo copywriting I would have rather prefer to a category for those keywords or even better, static pages, and trying to optimize my homepage for “seo services” keyword rather than optimizing the proper “seo services” page for that keyword would make no sense.

What the whole point, the point is that ranking higher in the SERPs with the proper page for our desired keywords where we are offering services (in a certain way, we are pre-selling our services with that page) will increase ROI as we are leading our visitors straight to our pre-selling page instead of in the homepage and drive them through our services page. And in ranking higher our inner pages (especially with blogs) we must “give a command” to search engine spider bots that they should give more weight to our inner page for that keyword rather than to our homepage.

In the past, I notice that I was receiving organic traffic from search engines on my homepage for keywords that were used in a blog post, even if the post would be displayed almost at the bottom of the homepage since wordpress blog displays latest posts on top and older ones move lower. The fact is that, those visitors that would land in a page when they search for a certain keyword they want to land straight in the page that has their information, instead of seeking around the blog (or site), they already performed one search with the search engines, no need to bother them make another search in our site until they find their information. Those same visitors that landed on my homepage spend something like 1-5 seconds and would go away as the information was not right in front of their nose, while the visitors that would find their informations through organic search and land in the blog post that HAS that information passed between 1-10 minutes in the blog.

It is obvious that helping search engines figure which page treats a certain argument and ranking higher with that page in the SERPs increases the time spent in the site as visitors start reading. Putting in act a smart internal linking and interlinking with inner pages of my blog that had to do with the same topic increased as well the page views, after all, people came to this blog for a information so nothing is going to stop them digg deeper, actually you want them to digg deeper and the best way to achieve that is by interlinking with your inner pages.

You might be wondering why one should be trying to rank higher with the blog posts page when he/she is not even offering services. If you are one of those make money online bloggers that wants to achieve to make a living online, and to do so you are most likely using review post for certain product and using affiliate links to it, or simply using Google AdSense than you should know that Ads that are displayed in your Google AdSense box don’t depend ONLY on your content (even tho, pretty much by using the Google AdSense ad section you can optimize ads in your site) but it also depends on the keywords for which visitors found you via organic search and hence the ads will be more likely related to what the visitors was looking after and increase the click through rate (CTR). Same applies when using reviews with affiliate links, a person that performs a search query in search engines for lets say measure keyword density will most likely end up in my blog post measure keyword density where I am using affiliate link to WebCEO, a seo software which I often use.

By eliminating the duplicate content we tell the search engine spider bots how they should treat the pages of your blog and which post is more relevant and useful with informations to the visitors that perform search query for the used keywords. Duplicate content should be seriously treated when we think about on page search engine optimization, most of the blogs I have seen around suffer from duplicate content that they cause within their blog (apart from content thieves).

I will make sure that in the next post (if not the next, the one after) I will write about how to eliminate duplicate content at 99% with wordpress blog and boost search engine rankings for the inner pages. If you would like to follow up SEO Optimization on this topic than subscribe to my RSS feed to know when the post will be published.

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