via I'd Rather Be Writing http://idratherbewriting.com/2013/12/16/seo-duplicate-content-and-single-sourcing/

Single sourcing and duplicate content (search engine optimization)

December 16, 2013 » findability » 9 Replies

ARTICLES IN THIS SERIES

1. Introduction, frames, iframes, and tech comm tools (search engine optimization)
2. Single sourcing and duplicate content (search engine optimization)
3. Researching the right keywords (search engine optimization)

One of the challenges technical writers face in search engine optimizing their documentation is deliberating between single sourcing and duplicate content. Google tries to return a variety of unique results, rather the same versions. If you have multiple versions of the same content online, Google will likely just rank the version it perceives as best and bury the others.

I’m referring here to single sourcing the same content to multiple online versions, not necessarily a version for different mediums. Suppose you have 9 online guides for “ACME Software”: Version 1.0, Version 2.0, Version 3.0. And for each version, you have a Beginner Help, Administrator Help, and a Role-based Help (for managers). Further, you have printed versions (also online) of each of the 9 guides. This means you have 18 guides total.

In every version of the guide, you have a topic called “Setting Preferences.” What happens when a user searches for the keywords “setting preferences for ACME help” on Google? Will all versions of the “Setting Preferences” topic appear, given the high degree to which this topic is duplicated?

No, only 2 versions will probably appear — one web version and one print version. Here’s Google’s explanation:

Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. (See Duplicate content.)

In other words, Google will try its best to only show search results that are unique to the user. If two web pages have pretty much the same content, only one page gets shown. Google does recognize a difference between printed material and online material, so it’s likely that both the PDF version of the guide and the specific page will appear.

In sum, if a user wants version 2.0 of the guide for administrators, he or she has a low chance (maybe 12%) of actually getting that result in a Google search.

Why duplicate content gets dropped: Spammy sites

Even though the single sourcing scenario I described isn’t addressed in many discussions of duplicate content among SEO experts, the topic of duplicate content is widely discussed. This is because a great many websites scrape content from other sites. For example, I sometimes get pingbacks from spammy sites that have scraped (copied) the content from my RSS feed and posted it on their site in order to rank for specific keywords.

Google doesn’t want to penalize the victims of site scraping by demoting both versions of the content. Therefore Google demotes the spammy site while promoting the original site. Its algorithms are usually smart enough to tell the difference, but if it accidentally prioritizes the spammy site, you can report the scraper site through this form.

Canonical tags to the rescue

Duplicate content has also been a problem for mainstream web platforms such as WordPress. Not only is there a version of this post in the single page view, there’s also a version on the homepage, date-based archives, category archives, tag archives, and possibly series archives.

To let Google know the right page to prioritize in the search results, you can add the following link in the head of all pages that are the same:

1	<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/the-real-page"/>

where the-real-page is the canonical page.

The canonical link tag let’s Google know that this version of the page is in the canon — the other versions that duplicate this page are to be ignored.

If you’re publishing multiple versions of help material online, consider adding the canonical link tag to the version that you want surfaced in the search results. Adding a canonical link tag will ensure that one page gets priority over other pages. (See rel=”canonical” on Google Webmaster Tools Help Center for more information.)

Let’s apply the canonical tag to the previous scenario: Which “Setting Preferences” topic should we prioritize as the canonical topic?

One solution might be to add canonical links to the latest version only, and to choose the administrator’s guide. In the administrator’s guide, we could add a sidebar with links that allow users to access previous versions or other guides.

The problem with this method is that it limits Google to one type of search result only. If you’re a manager using version 2.0 instead of 3.0, how can you search for that version of content on Google? You can’t. You would be limited to the search results provided within your HTML help output.

Linking instead of duplicating

In an effort to avoid duplicate content, let’s explore a different strategy altogether. Instead of duplicating content, try putting one version of the content online and link to the various places where you need it.

For example, you might have different tables of contents that show different arrangements of the material (a Beginner TOC, Administrator TOC, and Manager TOC), but all TOCs that contain the “Setting Preferences” topic would point to the same topic.

With this strategy, you’ll quickly realize that you can’t have a Beginner TOC appear on the left of Setting Preferences, as well as have the Administrator TOC appear on the left of Setting Preferences, as well as a Manager TOC on the left of Setting Preferences.

And this is the problem with TOCs: they lock you into a fixed navigation based on a pre-defined idea of content order and containers. Further, they make it nearly impossible to deal with duplicate content.

Moving from print to web models

Mark Baker expands on the TOC problem in a comment in a previous post. He encourages us to move from print to web models:

Tom, I think the tech comm’s obsession with single sourcing and reuse are an indication that it is still stuck in paper-world thinking. Reuse makes perfect sense in the paper world because a person reading one book has to go to a lot of effort to refer to another book — in some cases it could be days or weeks of effort and considerable expense. Better than to repeat material in each book where it might be required than to reference another book that the reader might have a hard time locating.

On the Web, on the other hand, following a link is instantaneous and costs nothing. It makes far more sense to link to ancillary material than to reuse it inline in multiple places. (Which, of course, relates directly to the discussion in your last post. )

Tech comm should be worrying far less about reuse and far more about effective linking.

Of course, there are still many pubs groups that have to produce some form of off-line media, whether it be paper or captive help systems. As long as they have to keep producing those media, reuse does continue to make sense for them.

The problem with current practice, and with current tools, is that they are optimized for this kind of output and still create output for the Web by taking the individual separate documents generated on the paper/captive help model, with all of their duplicated (reused) content, and simply converting them to HTML. (Which is exactly why, as you observe, many of these tools create output that is not search friendly. In addition, such material is usually link-impoverished, which makes it not browse friendly either.)

What we need are a new generation of Web friendly, Web first, hypertext-oriented tools that can also do reuse for paper/captive help outputs, but which use links rather than repetition in the Web output. In other words, they need to be able to compose entire documentation sets entirely differently for the Web and for print/captive help.

In other words, the table of contents is a very paper-centric model for organizing content. Mark isn’t necessarily recommending that we delete the TOC altogether, just remove it as a fixed element to the side of each page.

You could still have a page that lists arrangements of links, such as what the WordPress Codex authors do here. But the table of contents doesn’t carry through to every single page, except at a high level.

Instead of TOCs, Wikipedia uses a model called portal pages, and you can see an example here for Ancient Rome. The portal page is like a trail map to the content.

The same topic could have numerous different portal pages that show you different entry points through the content. The portal pages might have different focuses based on different business scenarios.

Here are a couple of other minimal TOC approaches. Here’s an article from Google Webmaster Tools Help that shows a minimal TOC on the left.

There’s a lot more content in their Google Webmaster Tools Help Center. But they aren’t trying to force all content into one massive TOC. The same topic might be linked to in the Get Started, Learn More, and Fix a Problem sections.

DataSift’s help gives another example of a TOC-less organization. The only TOC on the page is a list of pages highly related to the current page you’re viewing.

The documentation homepage contains a larger variety of links. These links are not forced through as a TOC sidebar to every page.

Assume readers begin at search, not the TOC

Wouldn’t many readers be lost without the fixed TOC on the left side of each page to guide and navigate them through the topics? Mark would say, assume that a user begins at search and searches for content matching specific keywords. Once the user lands on search results, if there are other articles related to the existing article, those articles should be linked within the article. Thus a reader navigates by two main methods:

• Search results
• Internal links within topics

Without question, this kind of organization puts more burden on the page to stand as acomplete whole. As a reader, you don’t want to jump back and forth to a portal page each time you want to read another paragraph or list of steps. In this model, pages are longer, more all-encompassing in helping users achieve their goals.

For more details, see Mark Baker’s book, Every Page Is Page One. (I highly recommend this book.)

The TOC-less model is most common with wiki architectures such as with Mediawiki sites. The main strength is to free content from one fixed structure. Removing the TOC allows you to create a trail guide (or portal page, or main contents list — whatever you want to call it) that provides a variety of paths through the same content. This way you can have 9 versions of guides while avoiding duplication of content.

SEO Review: Glamor and Glitz But Few Organic Clicks

OCTOBER 18, 2013 • JILL KOCHER

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Fashion-oriented stationer Pergamino has an organic search traffic problem – there’s not enough of it. Founder and Chief Creative Officer Monica Luburich reached out for an SEO review to find out how to improve her site’s organic search performance.

Luburich’s challenge with organic search as an entrepreneur creating and selling high-fashion greeting cards online is not unusual. Her strength lies in her creativity, as well as her background in business and fashion. As a reflection of those strengths and the highly visual nature of her product, the ecommerce site is heavy on product imagery and light on textual content in the places that really matter.

As with all ecommerce sites, in order to drive organic search traffic and sales Pergamino needs to send keyword signals for popular search phrases. The strength of those keyword signals needs to also be amplified and verified by earning links from other sites across the Internet.

This single article can’t recommend every optimization required for a site, but a focus on keywords and links is foundational to any site’s success.

Keyword Choices

First and foremost, Pergamino sells greeting cards and note cards. These are special greeting cards, “tastefully hand-glittered greeting cards are printed with eco-friendly inks on luxe, recycled paper” with a “cashmere-soft texture.” But when customers search for the product that Pergamino sells they search for “greeting cards.” Consequently, if Pergamino wants to attract organic search visits and convert them to sales, the site will have to begin researching the words people use to search for their products and incorporating these keyword phrases into the site strategically.

Niche keywords, at right, have less SEO competition.

For example, Pergamino is relevant to phrases like “birthday cards,” “thank you notes,” and “note cards.” Not surprisingly, the chart above shows that these are highly searched phrases. They’re also highly competitive. Major e-card and ecommerce sites like 123Greetings, Shutterfly, Zazzle and Hallmark rank on page one in Google for “birthday cards.” Even handcrafted greeting card brand Papyrus isn’t listed on page one. A boutique site like Pergamino would be hard pressed to quickly compete in that keyword market. Over time, with the right focus and dedication, anything is possible.

More niche keyword phrases typically generate less competition, as well as fewer searches. Searchers are not searching for the precise product Pergamino sells — “illustrated fashion birthday cards” — unfortunately. Research shows that searchers do query Google for modifiers like “beautiful,” “sassy,” “pretty,” and “glitter” in association with greeting card phrases. Further keyword research would hopefully result in additional modifiers and niches of greeting card keywords that Pergamino can target successfully with SEO. I’ve addressed keyword research previously, at “Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 1: Keyword Research.”

Using Keywords in the Content

Once the keywords have been defined, they need to be applied strategically to the relevant pages. The most important elements on each page for SEO are the title tag and descriptive content. Pergamino uses the same title tag on each page: “Pergamino.” This wastes a valuable opportunity to tell search engines in approximately 65 characters what the page should rank for.

For example, the home page might target “greeting cards” and “sassy cards.” The title tag could read something like this: “Pergamino Greeting Cards: Sassy Cards Celebrating Beautiful Women.” I’d normally end with the brand instead of leading with it, but Pergamino needs to build brand recognition as well as organic search visibility.

The next step is incorporating the keywords into the descriptive content on the page. Actually, before Pergamino can do that, it needs to add space into the template to accept textual content. The same is true of the category pages as well.

Pergamino home page.

The only keywords that appear on the home page are the “Greeting Cards” and “Stationery” buttons that link to the product category pages. Each of these buttons could also be tagged with H2 headings to emphasize their importance slightly to the search engines.

The tagline “Fine Papers For The Well-Heeled…” is not a long enough piece of text, nor does it contain any phrases that searchers would search for. Perhaps the tagline area could be expanded to accept two sentences of copy that contain the keywords chosen for the title tag. Or perhaps the size of the three primary images could be reduced to make room for descriptive text beneath them.

On each page, the body content should describe that page’s product offering for customers and use the targeted keywords at least once. If the copy is short, don’t try to work in repetitions of the keyword phrases or the result will be spammy for search engines and unpleasant for customers.

Lead the copy block off with a descriptive headline coded as an H1 heading. On the home page the H1 heading could simply be “Pergamino Greeting Cards.”

On product pages, the amount of copy is sufficient for SEO, but every product in the same category shares the same product description. Only the inscription inside the card and horoscope description, if there is one, is unique to each product. In order for the individual cards to rank, they need to target unique keywords with unique title tags, body content and headings.

Link Authority

Lastly, and most importantly, Pergamino suffers from a lack of link authority. Google Webmaster Tools shows less than 1,000 links in its link profile. For a site competing with the likes of Hallmark, Shutterfly and 123Greetings, 1,000 inbound links is a drop in the bucket.

These scattter graphs show link authority passing from in-bound links.  More pink is better.

The chart above visualizes the link profiles for these four sites. The pink splatter graphs show the amount of authority passed by other sites to the site shown. More pink is better, and pink closer to the upper right corner is better.

Often, sites with widely recognized brand names and long histories boast stronger link profiles. These sites are difficult to compete against in organic search as a result, particularly for boutique shops with a very niche product offering.

Pergamino has been featured in a handful of blogs like Opulent Creations Events and Why Not Girl. These posts appear to be the result of connections made at industry shows and in the course of business. This is a great start to earning link authority. The most recent ones seem to be aging rapidly, though. A continued focus on leveraging connections for the publicity and link authority they can generate will be very beneficial.

Pergamino also has a nice start on Pinterest. While Pinterest isn’t going to provide a ton of SEO value, Pergamino has had some success there. Google attributes over half of Pergamino’s backlinks to Pinterest. While these may not pass actual link authority, they are clearly visible to Google and may count as social signals somewhere in Google’s algorithm.

Even without direct SEO value, Pergamino should continue to capitalize on its Pinterest successes by reaching out to pinning fans and continuing to post a diverse selection of Pins alongside its product Pins. (For more, see “Does Pinterest Help with SEO.”) Pergamino should also consider linking to its Pinterest profile from its site in the same way it links to its Facebook and Twitter profiles. Adding Pinterest and Twitter sharing widgets to the product pages alongside the Facebook widget is another excellent way to encourage visitors to share. While all this social activity won’t directly boost link authority — because the links are purposely stripped of SEO value — social activity gets the brand and product in front of more eyeballs. Some of those shares will turn into blog posts and links as well as reshares, site visits and sales.

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/59953-SEO-Review-Glamor-and-Glitz-But-Few-Organic-Clicks

Quick SEO Tips to Boost Holiday Sales

NOVEMBER 4, 2013 • JILL KOCHER

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The holiday selling season is in full swing. If your natural search visits and sales are falling short of your goals, try these quick search-engine-optimization tips to give them a boost. Focus first on what you control — on the pages and keyword phrases that will actually make a difference.

Find the Sweet Spots

Before you touch a single title tag, do a quick analysis of your natural search performance. It’s tempting to skip this step to get right to making things better, but it’s just as likely you’ll make things worse. An hour spent with the data will tell you where to focus and what to tweak.

Start with the natural search visits and conversions reports from your analytics, specifically on the entry page and keyword reports. Which entry pages and keywords drive the most natural search visits and conversions? Then move to your Google Webmaster Tools account and match the entry pages and keywords from your analytics with the entry pages and keywords in the “Search Queries” report. This will give you an idea of how you’re ranking for those entry pages and keywords, as well as how many natural search impressions you’re getting.

How do you use this data? Your brand name is probably among the top performing natural search keywords, both in terms of rankings and impressions, as well as visits and conversions. Your home page most likely has the highest visibility. Tweaking these already performing pages and keywords is likely to have little benefit to performance.

Nudge the Lazy Middle

It’s far faster and easier to nudge an underperforming page up a couple of ranking spots than to improve a page with nonexistent performance. And there is typically more benefit to squeeze from the underperformers than the pages and keyword phrases that are already performing strongly.

It’s far faster and easier to nudge an underperforming page up a couple of ranking spots than to improve a page with nonexistent performance.

Identify the pages and keyword phrases that drove some natural search performance, but should be able to drive more based on the keyword research. Compare your impression, ranking, visits, and conversion data to keyword research to identify which keywords are underperforming.

Look for keyword phrases that capture between 0.1 and 1 percent of the available keyword market. These keyword phrases are visible enough to drive natural search traffic to your site but not relevant or authoritative enough to perform strongly. Then look for ones that pages that rank between positions 5 and 20 in Google. These pages are visible enough to rank, but not optimal enough to rank well.

These pages are your lazy middle. Whip them into shape with some of the optimization tips below to help them drive the natural search visits and sales you need.

Optimize for Relevance

Take another look at your keyword research and keyword map. Are the lazy middle entry pages you’ve identified as opportunities to grow SEO performance optimized as strongly as they can be for the terms assigned to them in the keyword map? Does the keyword assigned mesh with the reality of the keyword phrases driving customers to that landing page? This is the time to re-optimize the pages to reflect the keyword phrases that the data suggests are best suited to that page.

Starting with the pages that represent the best opportunity, rework the title tag, meta description, main heading, and body copy. The changes likely won’t be huge, and may just be a matter of swapping one phrase for another or changing up a sentence or two to make the keyword phrase more prominent.

You’re probably thinking, “But that’s just basic SEO.” Yes, it is. And the reason it’s basic SEO is that it’s foundational to everything else. Without strong on-page SEO to send a clear relevance signal, everything else in your SEO strategy is just amplifying a muddy signal. Most merchants can find basic on-page SEO elements to improve on at least half of the pages they are targeting if they just take the time to do it.

Cross Link for Authority

Rankings require authority signals as well as relevance signals. Cross-linking and cross-promotional elements can help funnel additional link authority from throughout the site to the pages for which you most want to improve natural search performance. External links from other sites would have a much larger benefit, but they’re also more difficult to acquire quickly and ethically. Start with elements you can control for faster performance improvement.

Thinking about those lazy middle pages. Which of them has the potential to drive the highest natural search visits and conversions? Create a list of pages on your site that are relevant to that high-potential page and design a cross-linking element to drive link authority to that page.

If you can do it quickly and professionally, consider a visual element like a call out box with a relevant image and a line of text that contains the keyword phrase for which you want your high-potential page to rank. If you don’t have the resources or the access to your platform to make larger changes, perhaps you can insert selected links into text fields on relevant pages. These cross-linking elements should also double as relevant cross-promotional elements that, if done well, will improve customer experience.

For example, if you sell Christmas sweaters and your sweaters featuring reindeer are not getting the natural search visibility they need, a cross-linking element on the Santa Claus sweaters and Christmas tree sweaters pages pointing to the reindeer sweaters page may help. In other cases, the page you have linked to may be a single product page or an informational page.

Drive More Clicks

Even pages that are ranking well can be optimized to drive more clicks from the search results. If your high rankings aren’t driving the visits you’re expecting, consider optimizing specifically to attract searcher clicks to your search result instead of your competitors’.

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/60445-Quick-SEO-Tips-to-Boost-Holiday-Sales

Writing Great Links: Web Writing 101

How do you make your current content better? Or, how do you start writing great web content that converts your browsers into customers?

In this video, from our popular digital writing workshops, Ahava explains best practices for:

• Creating  links
• Keeping the conversation moving during content with links
• Labeling links correctly
• Using links to keep your site sticky
• Designing for links

Related Blog Posts:

• How to Make Your Hyperlinks More Effective
• Use the Inverted Pyramid: Creating Actionable Content

via Online it ALL Matters http://onlineitallmatters.blogspot.com/2013/10/writing-great-links-web-writing-101.html