Posts Tagged ‘Duplicate Content Penalty’

Having Multiple Income Streams Is a Smart Move

One problem that many people encounter in online business is that they don’t have enough income streams.  Not just in the sense of having multiple products, although that’s a major part of it, but also that they don’t have multiple payment options.  Just as the Internet is called “The Web,” you need to have a web around yourself, rather than just one channel of income.

The reality is that not every online shopper has PayPal.  Nor does everyone have a credit card.  If you don’t use both of them, you’re going to cut off one form of payment or another.  You’ll be making less money than you could otherwise.  It may cost a little more to use both Authorize.net and PayPal, but it will be well worth it.

Selling multiple products is great as well.  Diversity is a key element of success in online marketing.  You don’t want to overwhelm yourself by running too many projects, of course, but having several product options also gives you a diverse income stream.  If you can at all, you should use both PayPal and Authorize.net on all of them to monetize them to the max.

To maximize your earning potential is the key to success in any business, including online business.  The key to making this happen in online business is to have multiple income streams.  If you’re just relying on one line of income, you’re effectively cutting off other ways people can pay you.

Meta Keywords Are not Useless – Contrary to Popular Belief

To say that meta keywords are useless is a bit exaggerated. While it’s true that they don’t have the same punch as they once did, they still have some uses. Overreaction is bad business in SEO.

For one thing, Yahoo still picks them up. You have to trick it a little, though, by misspelling the keywords.

Google and MSN get a little more complicated. They say that meta tags can’t affect your SERP rankings, but they can improve your click-through ratings. Now, if your click-through ratings directly affect your SERP placement, doesn’t that mean that meta tags DO influence your SERP rankings?

The logic gets more twisted than that with Google. In their webmaster support, they suggest using quality and truly descriptive descriptions because they can go a long way toward improving the amount and quality of your traffic. Traffic, again, increases your SERP placement, so what do they mean by saying meta descriptions don’t matter?

What about Web 2.0? This really gets crazy. It seems that all kinds of rules that Google sets up for webmasters to follow just get thrown out the window. Tell me that the tag clouds aren’t keyword abuse! With a little bit of snooping around, you’ll see that blogs in particular get away with a lot of stuff that other sites can’t do.

There’s also a funny little thing where meta keyword tags will hurt your rankings if you use the same meta description for every page on your site. If they don’t matter, then why the negative results? A lot can be learned about what still matters by seeing how it can get you the Google smack if you do it wrong.

Did You Know Google Has No Duplicate Content Penalty?

That’s right.  Google doesn’t have a duplicate content penalty.  This is a myth that was based on a misunderstanding of Google’s behavior.  It’s an understandable mistake, though.

Basically, it all started when some SEO specialists noticed that their web sites lost rank when they had two pages with the same content, and regained rank when one of them got deleted.  It seemed to be a natural assumption that Google didn’t like duplicate content.  As it turns out, this is not the case.

What actually happens is that a lot of the time, one of the two pages with the same content isn’t as well optimized as the other.  If the less optimized of the two pages gets crawled first, the better one gets ignored in the ranking score.  The spiders just don’t know any different and don’t care.  They are, after all, only robots.

Now that we’ve cleared the air on this issue, there are three ways of dealing with this problem.  The first is pretty simple:  Just delete the lesser optimized page.  Of course, the problem is that you will lose one of your pages.

However, what if you want to keep the page?  In this case, you have two options.  The first is to optimize both pages the same way.  This way, it won’t matter which page gets passed up.  You keep your ranking and you keep your pages.

The third way is less complicated than optimizing another page.  The way you handle this is to go into your web site’s page map and remove the less optimized page.  Again, you still get to keep both pages and have your ranking be untouched.

It’s altogether too easy for people to mistake what goes on behind the white wall of Google.  That’s why you have to keep beating at it.

~Andy Michaels