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I trust you have all enjoyed your holidays, those of you that have been fortunate enough to have taken one. The kids are all back to school, the tan is beginning to fade, so it's back to the day job to start earning and saving for the next one.
The dangers of content duplication are well documented, it is a subject that keeps reappearing on an all too regular frequency.
Whether it be by accident from canonical domains , webmaster laziness or deliberate through content plagiarism . However until now there was one channel that (to Google anyway) was sacrosanct - News. And this is the focus of this months newsletter.
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Matt Paines |
Death knell sounds for duplicate copy
Google's deal to post the articles from news agencies on its Google News portal is a coup - especially given that it was locked in legal battles with some of them not so long ago. It now means news agencies will be credited for any articles which will be posted on Google News pages.
But the bigger story is behind the headlines.
At the same time as announcing the deal with the various news wires, Google also launched its Duplicate Detection tool which is going to have massive implications for news content.
Essentially it's going to discount any news stories which could appear on Google News where websites have simply cut and pasted news from other sources which would potentially include direct RSS feeds, as part their content generation strategy.
This matters on two crucial fronts. Firstly it means websites lose the opportunity to have their industry news found in lateral search. And secondly, but more importantly (here's the killer) Google is sending another clear message about what it thinks of duplicate content. In short, it hates it and could penalise sites which persist in doing it.
Originate not duplicate
All that search engines, like Google, want is for websites to post authoritative and informative content. One of the best ways of doing this, as part of any SEO strategy, is to provide a feed of original industry news that is not plagiarised from elsewhere.
But given that Google is very dismissive of sites that are sloppy with their copy, getting it right is important. And all it requires is a little effort.
That effort is as simple as taking the most pertinent industry news and putting your own spin on it. Or, for the more adventurous, rewriting it with your own additional comments.
It's no great secret as newsrooms across the world have been doing it since the fist newspapers were printed. If all this sounds like a lot of hard work, remember being at the top of Google is about being the most authoritative in your space. There are companies and organisations, such as FeedAngel, that specialise in this field.
Update to Free Tutorials
If you have used our FREE SEO tutorials in the past, we hope you found them useful and many thanks for the feedback. The updated tutorials (announced last month) bring even more new tools and try to explain in greater detail how SEO is done properly,
and yes they are still FREE to read...
Don't forget you can access the Search Engine News blog online, giving more up-to-the-minute news and views in the world of search and Internet marketing.
Interesting fact ...
"Did you know, too many delimiters, dashes ( - ) and underscores ( _ ), can be interpreted as a site that is actively optimising, and therefore hinder your search ranking?"
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