Marc McDermott

Search Engine Strategies (SES) NYC March 09

Posted on 09. Jul, 2009 by Marc McDermott in SEO

While I certainly intended to post this immediately following the seminar in March, I have since found this misplaced document!

My first SES session focused on duplicate content and multi site issues.  While we are all aware of the dangers/ineffectiveness of duplicate content, both for users and search engines, there were a few interesting thoughts I took away from the session.

One of the major things talked about was website shingles/boiler plates.  Simply put, these are elements such as navigation, headers, footers, and/or other wrappers that appear on multiple pages within a website.  This can also be true for titles/metas/headers IF they are the same across multiple pages (hence the reason why these fields should contain BOTH what’s important to the campaign, as well as what’s on the page).

Part of Google’s algorithm may choose not to look at boilerplate elements when crawling a site.  This is why it is extremely important to focus on optimizing the unique content areas on each page of your site.  While I can’t say for sure Google already has this boilerplate recognition foolproof in their algorithm, you can bet they will in the very near future.

A statistic I found quite interesting was that one third of the web is duplicate content.  Now I’m not quite sure of the validity and/or the source of this statistic, but you get the picture.  I’ve been saying for the longest time to look at the big picture; how Google operates, what are their core business models, why they dominate search market share.
Stop, sit back and think about this.  Search engines (specifically Google, Yahoo, and Live) are all businesses like any other business.  Ask yourself:

•    What is their product?
•    How do they make money?
•    How do they ensure future revenues?
•    Who are the customers?

Spoiler alert.  Search engines are in business to provide relevant, quality, and unique information.  Think about it, most people use Google because they usually find exactly what they are looking for based upon their search query.  If they didn’t, they’d move on to other search engines.

Back to some more specific examples from SES, the next theme I thought was valuable was article/blog post syndication.  Nothing really new here but I will reiterate some things many of us already know.  To better explain this, I will give an example of what I do for article syndication.

Whenever I post an article written by an attorney on their website, I usually Digg the article upon publication to allow Google to naturally find the new content.  I would argue this method is much better and faster than simply updating/pinging your sitemap.  I make sure my Digg article title and 1-2 line description is unique from the article itself.  Google will pick up and index this new content very quickly with this method.

The only other topic discussed in this session was the overall lack of understanding between domain.com and www.domain.com.  I could go on for another 2 pages about my frustrations on this topic so I will leave it at that.