Link building is incredibly important to a successful SEO strategy. In fact, Google’s most preliminary technology, detailed in their very first patent, “Method for Node Ranking in a Linked Database,” relied very heavily on links to determine site quality, and it still does to this day. As the patent says, “The rank assigned to a document is calculated from the ranks of documents citing it.”

So Google and other search engines rely on inbound links (links pointing to your website from other/external websites) to, at least in part, determine how trustworthy your content is. This aspect of their ranking technology is often referred to as “PageRank.”

What has changed over the years is how strict Google is about how you’re permitted to “build,” or grow the amount of, links that point to your site. According to Google’s current link guidance…

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

So, basically, this is saying that you’re not allowed to do ANYTHING to intentionally manipulate the number of other websites that link to your website.

Therefore, the only by-the-book way to “build” links is to “earn” them.

Earning links naturally is not easy, but is absolutely doable, through the following activities:

• Good content marketing (publishing content regularly on your website that your target audience would find genuinely useful, educational, and helpful)
• Promoting that content through strong social media and public relations efforts, so that more people see it and react to it, either through social sharing or linking to your site
• Generating unique market research reports that news outlets would find interesting, and pitching them to link to your data as the source of their stories about it
• Establishing real-world relationships with other organizations that naturally lead to the acquisition of links (for example, joining a Chamber of Commerce, or offering scholarships and internships to students at a local university)
• Any similar activity that does NOT involve manually creating or buying links that point to your site

Taking all of this into account, our stance at Pam Ann Marketing is that we do NOT offer our clients any form of manual link building services. We simply encourage our clients to have strong content marketing, social media,  public relations, and “real world” relationship marketing strategies and partnerships in place.

We do; however, assist clients in generating their content marketing strategies through SEO keyword research and editorial calendar management, where we help clients come up with article topics that their target audience is searching for and keyword optimization strategies for each article. This makes each and every piece of content marketing more findable on the web, and more likely to naturally earn links in the non-manual way that Google demands.

We also educate our clients on the dangers of ignoring Google’s very strong and clear guidance about avoiding manual link building. Google has been on a mission, for many years now, to continually strengthen their algorithms’ ability to detect and penalize manual link building activity. If your site engages in such activity, it will be at a real risk of incurring a search engine penalty, and you will have to pay more to undo what you paid to have done, just to have the right to file a “reconsideration request” to beg Google to allow you back into their search engine. It’s a nightmare situation that we don’t want ANY client to EVER have to deal with.

We have even seen link networks (sources where inbound links can be purchased) hold website owners RANSOM when they incur a penalty and need their manually-built links taken down. They demand ridiculous fees to take down the links (that the website owner already paid them once to create) because they know that you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, and they have you in a uniquely desperate position where they can take advantage of you.

So the key takeaway here is to never, ever, ever build links manually. Simply focus on the good marketing practices outlined above to naturally earn links in a safe way that will never leave you “kicked out of Google.”

A very common inquiry we receive is regarding just how problematic “duplicate content” is for SEO. This article aims to explain our particular interpretation of this common SEO consideration.

First of All, What Exactly is Duplicate Content?

For SEO purposes, we define duplicate content as a situation that occurs when two or more URLs (links) on the web contain the same or very similar content.

Those two or more URLs could be on the same domain (yourcompany.com) or different domains. For example, if the following two links loaded the same exact content, that would be an example of full duplicate content: http://yourcompany.com/page1.htm and http://yourcompany.com/page1.html (Note that one ends in .htm and the other in .html.)

There are also scenarios where partial duplicate content exists. Duplicate content of this nature commonly occurs when other websites “syndicate” or “scrape” content, with or without permission.

If http://yourcompany.com/blog2 and http://othercompany.com/article2 contain the same article, that would be partial duplicate content (because the header and footer of the sites are different, but the core body content is the same). This isn’t necessarily always bad, as we will explain later in this article.

Another common example of partial duplicate content occurs when a manufacturer’s website publishes a product description, and then multiple resellers copy that same product description onto their e-commerce sites. Even if they title the products differently, there’s an exact copy of the product description amongst several different websites.

Many ecommerce sites also end up with this problem within their own site. If the same product gets placed in several categories and the category is part of the URL, you can end up with the same content rendering on:

http://yourstore.com/shirts/shirt1

http://yourstore.com/t-shirts/shirt1

(Note that one URL has a category of “shirts” and the other has a category of “t-shirts”, but the product is the same.)

So, just how much of a page needs to be similar in order for search engines to consider it duplicate content?

Unfortunately, search engines don’t dictate a certain percentage of uniqueness that you can work off of, but that’s not really how it works anyway.

Search engines assess page content in sections – so they look at the titles separately from the body copy, separately from the footer, etc. So if you have multiple pages with the same titles, but everything else on that page is unique, that can still be problematic since that particular section is duplicated across multiple URLs.

How to Check for Duplicate Content

If you are curious to compare two URLs from a percentage perspective, since a high percentage would indeed be indicative of a whole section being duplicated, you can use this tool: http://www.copyscape.com/compare.php

You can also use CopyScape to check the web for copies of content across multiple domains. Visit their homepage for that tool: http://www.copyscape.com/

It is also recommended to use a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider to assess individual elements like title tags and H1s for duplicate content in those particular sections. (If you’re a client of ours – don’t worry about this technical stuff, we’ve already done this for you.)

So How Bad of a Problem is Duplicate Content?

It depends. But first, let’s clear something up.

There is no such thing as a duplicate content “penalty” in Google. A penalty is an deliberate action that is taken against a site to demote or remove that site’s content from search results.

The downside to duplicate content is twofold:

1. Search engines never want to show two copies of the same result, so they will simply ignore one copy. Often they prefer the original (oldest) copy that was published first, ignoring newer copies – but other times they will default to showing the copy that is on the highest authority website. For example, if CNN.com published a copy of an article from our site – it would be likely that the CNN copy would win over ours, even if our copy came out first.
2. When duplicate content exists within a single site, it simply makes it harder for the search engine crawlers to understand and decide which is the preferable copy to show in search results. But if you cannot avoid having duplicate copies of content on different URLs amongst your own site, there is a way to tell the search engines which copy you prefer be shown in search results. More on that shortly…

So unless your duplicate content issues are rampant (which could be a red flag for the Panda algorithm), you need not worry about a literal penalty for a bit of duplicate content here or there. Sometimes, it can even be beneficial.

How is Duplicate Content Potentially Beneficial?

If you write an article on your site that then gets picked up by (also published by) another website, and that website has a very good search engine reputation (like the CNN example above), then you A) are more likely to have your article and brand discovered on that site versus your own and B) very likely are getting a high-authority link back to your site from the article. A single or few instances of that scenario can help more than they hurt. However, if your articles are being syndicated to a plethora of lower quality sites, that most certainly does not have the same benefit and can do more harm than good.

Overall, it is best to try to avoid duplicate content whenever possible. If high authority sites are willing to publish your content, then consider writing unique content just for those sites, that won’t be published on your own site. You can even use that as an opportunity to optimize the article (and get found for) higher competition keywords than you otherwise would be able to use on your own site. We often recommend that our clients use LinkedIn’s publishing platform for this purpose. Write unique content for that, which will not appear on your own site, and use more difficult to rank for keywords than you would otherwise use on your own site, as the LinkedIn.com domain is likely to be favored for terms like that versus small business websites.

What to do if You Can’t Avoid Duplicate Content Within Your Site

Rel=Canonical is the Answer

If you do have scenarios within your own site where you cannot avoid having two copies of the same content on multiple URLs, there’s a simple way of telling the search engines which copy you want them to treat as the original that will get displayed in search results. That is done through the rel=canonical tag. It’s a simple code tag added to the header of the website to let the search engines know which is the original copy. In the product example given above, this could be done as such:

Copy 1: http://yourstore.com/shirts/shirt1

Copy 2: http://yourstore.com/t-shirts/shirt1 ← add the rel=canonical tag to this one indicating that “http://yourstore.com/shirts/shirt1” is the original/preferred copy

Rewriting is an option, too, but…

If you’re considering editing two sets of extremely similar content to try to make them unique from each other, that often ends up being even harder and more time consuming than writing an entirely new page or article from scratch. We’d suggest either A) Just going back to a clean slate and writing brand new copy with an entirely different spin on the topic, or B) Stick with the two copies and use the rel=canonical tag to mark one as the original.

In Conclusion

We hope this information was helpful, but often duplicate content concerns are best addressed on a case-by-case basis. We’re happy to discuss any concerns our clients (or potential clients) may have about a particular duplicate content challenge. That’s what we’re here for!

Open source software is not owned by any corporate entity. Popular open source website platforms like WordPress and Magento have communities of hundreds of thousands of programmers contributing to their codebase every day, and the full codebase is available for editing – allowing for full development flexibility.

We prefer open source website platforms for several reasons:

• Well-supported open source software like WordPress and Magento stays up to date with Google’s ever changing requirements better and faster than any proprietary platform can, and most patches/updates released to address Google’s new requirements are low or no-cost. Proprietary platforms pale in comparison to the speed of which well-supported open source platforms can respond to changing search engine requirements.
• Open source platforms do not put the client at risk of losing their website should the platform publisher go out of business, or discontinue that particular offering.
• Open source platforms are more portable. A website built in open source software can be easily transitioned to another hosting company and/or developer should either of those business relationships fall apart. (But clients should pay attention to their web design contract terms to ensure that they own their own content.)
• Most importantly, open source software is fully editable. There are no parts of the code or database that are locked down as intellectual property of the publisher. This, along with a flexible hosting plan where even the server settings can be adjusted, makes it so that we will not encounter roadblocks when trying to implement technical SEO enhancements, such as caching and minifying for speed optimization, which is becoming increasingly important for SEO. Speed optimizations and certain other technical SEO enhancements are extremely difficult, or often impossible, to execute on proprietary platforms like SquareSpace, Wix, Weebly, BigCommerce, Shopify, etc.

Therefore, we don’t prefer to take on projects where our efforts will be hindered by technical roadblocks. We prefer to work on SEO in open source environments where no such restrictions exist, and the client can fully realize the return on their investment.

• For non-transactional websites, we prefer WordPress, but can also work with Drupal and (least preferable) Joomla.
• For e-commerce, we gladly welcome sites built in Magento or WooCommerce (the e-commerce add on to WordPress).

Please let us know if you have any questions!