How To Shoot Yourself in The Foot With Bad Plan and a Bad CMS Implementation
Posted on March 30th, 2007by Michael Gray in Grayhat SEO
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One of the biggest mistakes really large publishers make today is doing SEO like it’s 1999. They throw up hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions of pages, with the belief that more is better. This has grown exponentially with web 2.0 and blogging apps and cross-tagging, listing and publishing content in multiple spots. Here’s an example that’s pretty typical of a problem I see with alarming frequency.
Here’s a link to page entitled Parents Report: Vaccine Update 2007 on healthykids.com. The original article comes from Parents.com but the content is featured on HealthyKids.com. Here’s the exact same article on Parents.com . Here’s the same article on LHJ.com (Ladies Home Journal) AmericanBaby.com, Child.com, Fitnessmagazine.com, More.com, midwestliving.com heck this article may be on hundreds of sites for all I know.
All of these publications are owned by the Meredith Corporation (ack sound link). Is the Meredith Corp a bunch of low down rotten black hat spammers? I don’t know if I’d go that far but if I had to guess I’d say they thought they were being “helpful” (to their users and themselves) publishing the content in multiple spots. However if they were my clients my advice would be “umm no, you guys should really stop doing that, sooner rather than later, and next week sounds like a really good time to start”.
Now looking at the SERP’s for [Report: Vaccine Update 2007] Google seems to have done a good job eliminating the duplicate listings. However I don’t know if HealtyKids.com is the best domain, it looks like they wanted it on Parents.com since that’s what the banners on all of the pages above indicate (that’s why I say you don’t want Google guessing the best spot, you want to tell Google where you want it).
What’s the takeaway here:
1) Put your content on only one page. It doesn’t matter if it’s your site, another site you own, a site you syndicate to, or your aunt’s sally’s macramé hobby website. Content should only be on one URL period.
2) if you are going to pull that web 2.0 mashup line on me and how it’s better for the users and Google should just figure it out, then you need a double mocha frappe espresso Grande with soy milk, cause it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee. Google may get it right they may get it wrong, why take the chance and cast your fate to the wind. Block the web 2.0 double tagging/publishing nonsense with robots AND meta tags … mkay (yes I said and remember people deep link).
3) Spend the time to make sure your CMS isn’t wackadoodle and letting you do stuff like this by design on purpose or by accident. I’m sure wordpress thought they were being helpful doing a lot of things that aren’t SEO-friendly.
Sphere: Related Content
March 30th, 2007 at 6:29 am
Great post. I’m tired of hearing so called experts proclaiming that Google can deal with duplicate content and can determine the original source of the content. While the algorithms have improved greatly it still not an exact science. If I spent time producing quality content then I’d damn well want to make sure i got the traffic and link love from it.
March 30th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Yes Michael, i came across that when i first started using wordpress, about 3 minutes after my first post.
great example with the meredith article. its a perfect example.
thank god for the robots file.
March 30th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Great, great post! My current employer is just now beginning to catch on to the idea that submitting the same article to literally hundreds of pr sites is not the smart thing to do. While this does generate thousands of back links in a very short period of time, our search rankings are taking the hit for that short term gain. Old habbits die hard.
March 30th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Good stuff!
Seems a lot of bloggers lately are guest posting on other blogs and the same post is appearing on their own blogs as well. Seems like dup content that runs into the same problems you describe.
What about posting excerpts that link to the full article, like using the more tag in WP on the index? Would SE’s see the first 50 words of a post in multiple places and consider it dup content?
March 30th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Weird, they just launched a redesign of their flagship site BHG.com this morning and I think they’re now starting to redirect their links to the intended domain.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:25 am
Top 12 Ways To Win Friends & Write Magnetic Headlines…
As a consultant who specializes in social media, I’ve learned one of the most powerful tools in gaining readers is the title or headline of your stories. Crafting a title that grabs someone’s eye, gets them to stop scanning and pay attention to your …
March 30th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
I agree completely about telling Google exactly what to do (with robots or meta, for example) but sometimes the content would do well “syndicated” like that. I know you know what I mean Michael, but it might be clearer here. Not everything is for search referred traffic, and if content raises awareness (or especially if it calls-to-action) I think sometimes it needs to be everywhere it can be. Naturally that leads to boring, syndicated content on all those non-prime-source sites, but publishing it was their own choice (think feeder sites in sub-markets).
March 30th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Meredith Publishing is one of the largest publishing companies in the US as well as one of the largest direct marketing mail order houses.
It is always “funny” to see these massively successful direct marketing houses come online and have problems with conversion and content placement.
Rodale Press has a similar issue with Men’s Health Magazine and the associated online portals. They have Men’s Health Diet and Fitness sites and membership programs and use email marketing to drive leads. For years their health/diet programs didn’t use bold, noticeable, underlined links and they had a conversion problem.
March 30th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Michael can that be solved by using the “nofollow tag” to the non original content sources?
I also have a blog at wordpress, started 2 months ago and now I see what you are saying respect to the CMS,I will be checking on that, thanks.
March 30th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
>Michael can that be solved by using the “nofollow tagâ€
No-Follow doesn’t keep people from deep linking and doesn’t keep spiders out it only keeps link juice from transferring