A Newsletter by SAM about using your website.

SAM

Random SAMsSites Stuff

1. Why is Redundant Content Penalized in Google?

2011-10-23 13:55:50

If you are searching a topic and the same article comes up five times, this could make your research less effective and more time consuming. An article posted many times comes from a common belief that spinning your article all over the web will bring you more exposure. All this is doing is cluttering the web with redundant content. It is also reducing your website's placement in the search engine rankings. This is even less effective than the traditional meta tag keyword myth. Look that one up. Redundant content has run its course, as Google, for one, looks for high-quality original sites in search of good content.

The World Wide Web is about content. It is a way to search and find something. It is important that content be original and clean. Google’s algorithms can now tell when an article is repeated and spun with a few words changed to fool the robots.

If you have a concern about rankings in search engines do not reuse your articles all over the web. If you want to post to a publisher, do not repeat the article on your site. It is O.K. to link. If the publisher does not archive the article, it is O.K. to post it on your site. If the publisher owns the article, then post it on yours, as it leaves their site and credits the publisher for the article. 

Penalizing for redundant content is also a protection against intellectual property theft. When you put content on your site, and someone steals your content, they stand the chance of their site being demoted for searches on their main keywords. This can also cause the site to disappear. Google’s status as top search engine comes from its insistence on good clean original content. The site with most good content ranks the highest.



2. Where is the best place to put your blog?

2011-10-25 13:03:08

When taking on the challenge of writing a blog, the decision comes up where do I put it. A few choices are; on Wordpress.com or on Blogspot.com. These are free places to create and store your blog. You can’t beat free. That is the major advantage to using these sites for a blog. One draw back to free, though, is the technical support; finding a person to talk to is not easy. If you lose where you are and how to get in, it could be hard finding your way back.

If you are the owner of a website and/or a domain name, consider putting your blog on your own website. That doesn’t mean making your blog the website; that is another topic. It means using a blog as a blog. A place to log your interests that supports your website.

The advantage here is even though you are paying for hosting and a webmaster to set up the blog, they will be a source of technical support. But even better than that, you own your own content. You are not loading it onto someone else’s site. It is your own database and it is content on your site. It is working for you on the search engines. Wordpress has a site wordpress.org where you download the software for free and then upload it to your site. You then format it to look like you want. It works the same way as the one on their free blog site.

Wordpress is created as an open source tool by its own team. Blogspot and/or Blogger are owned and created by Google. They both have RSS feeds. This makes them both searchable by the blog search within hours. We like Wordpress software for blogs not for websites; the blog has an RSS feed. Learn more about RSS feeds.

You would think using a Google blog like Blogspot would give you preferential treatment in Google search. But no, that is against Google's search rules. Wordpress is just as searchable. It doesn't matter where you store your content either -- on your site or theirs. It can be valuable as long as it is linked to your site; it can give you more exposure. As we follow the search engine robot rules, we believe blogs on your site give you more power and control over your content.