Here is a post that sets the record straight on Google’s policy toward duplicate content. Basically, duplicate content isn’t as bad as many people seem to think, and the fears surrounding them are largely unfounded. The article gives several advices for dealing with duplicate.

My advice is to focus on providing great content, whether or not it’s duplicate.

This is a post that I had meant to bring to your attention for a long time….oh well, better later than never.

There is a lot of talk these days about search engines devaluing purchased text links. To be sure, buying text links to manipulate one’s Google PageRank or rankings in the SERPs is a widely abused practice that warrants attention from the search engines. The argument is that such attention is needed to ensure relevant search results dictated by natural, rather than artificial, linking.

On the other hand, link buying is a perfectly legitimate form of advertising that predates search engines. I hear that search engines are especially targeting sitewide links. Sitewide links are viewed as “unnatural” by the search engines and hence raise a “red flag”. In fact, from an advertising standpoint, sitewides ensure the highest possible visibility for an advertiser’s site. To the extent that search engines tolerate link buying for the sole purpose of driving traffic to one’s site, it is odd that they should be targeting sitewides.

Matt Cutts had suggested using rel=”nofollow” attribute for sponsored links. While this seems like a good workaround I wonder how many webmasters are aware that they should be adopting this practice, and, more importantly, how many of them are willing to sell text links that do not pass PR to their sponsors or help them in the search rankings. The rel=”nofollow” solution will mean that site owners would have to charge less for text links, and now that advertisers are scared silly about buying text links, they would have to work harder to find sponsors. Site owners would now be in the business of strictly selling direct traffic rather than indirect traffic through SEO benefits. To attract sponsors, an unscrupulous webmaster might artificially inflate his Alexa rankings using one of the various scripts being sold on eBay. Who wouldn’t want to advertise on a site that prominently displays an Alexa ranking of 5,000? Others will continue to game the system by coming up with new linking schemes that will take the search engines five or six years to figure out.

Then there’s the itching suspicion of search engines trying to divert advertising dollars away from the text link market toward their own pay-per-click programs. Webmasters who spend $40,000 a year on Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing may not be too pleased to learn that they can no longer make a few bucks selling links from their sites on which they’ve spent a fortune to promote. To the extent that search giants like like Google and Yahoo are in the business of making money, they would be wise not take overzealous steps to stifle the entrepreneurial spirits of the “little guys”.

So, should search engines be cracking down on purchased links? Honestly, I can’t answer this question with a “yes” or “no”. Suffice it to say that link buying (and selling) is a complex issue that should be dealt with carefully by the search engines, given the complexity of the issue.

By Pat Quinn

When I joined my first London ad agency 40-something years ago, the copywriting department was presided over by a lapsed genius who beat into me a number of immutable copy principles. These precepts, which are as valid now as they were then and which have helped me shift truckloads of product worldwide, apply to all types of promotional writing. They apply even more so to selling on the Internet, where do-it-yourself copy is the norm rather than the exception. In the old days, very few serious advertisers wrote their own material. Today, they do so as a matter of course simply because the technology allows it.

Anyway, this little article is aimed at those who write their own web pages and also at those who hire a writer and may wish to check that he or she is working on the right lines. Below you’ll find just a few principles of good promotional writing. If the editor wants more, I’ll gladly provide them.

Keep it very simple

All copywriting should speak to its audience in everyday, uncomplicated language. People don’t like to be talked down to. And they grow tired of cliches and buzzwords. Also, keep your sentences short and punchy, with the minimum of clauses. Long and involved sentence structure is death to readership. (The six sentences above are examples of what I’m talking about. They are easy to scan and understand.)

All web pages should carry a headline

But this must be a pertinent headline. A selling headline. This headline will be, or should be, powerful enough or intriguing enough to draw your target into the compass of the body copy. If it can do that, you are on a winner.

It may go without saying that the entire thrust of your webpage should revolve around an offer or a promise. This offer or promise will be unique to you — it’s your unique sales proposition. It’s the one thing that sets you apart from your competitors; and it can be price, performance or service related. Given this, the headline should be a snapshot of the sales message — a precis of your offer or promise. In other words, a headline that says: Buy this product and get this benefit. I’m sure you already know that people don’t buy products, they buy the benefits of owning those products.

And when I say that every page of your site should carry a headline, I mean every page. Experience shows that a person will read a headline before looking at any accompanying pic or body copy. They do so preparatory to scooting off to someone else’s site. But if your on-going headlines tell them things of interest, they will almost certainly hang around to explore the site more fully.

Keep headlines relevant

Around 30% of all headlines on the Net are both useless and irrelevant. The worst of them are so convoluted, so desperate to say everything all at once, that they are unintelligible. The offending lines also employ tired buzzwords. The word “leverage”, for instance, in completely ungrammatical context; and words like “solutions” and “focus” are thrown around like generous confetti. The moral is this. State your sales proposition cleverly, wittily, stridently or emotively, but never, ever employ a cliche device simply because it’s the easy thing to do. If you can’t be original, at least be positive. And if you honestly don’t have very much to say, there are some really clever ways of saying nothing that will endear you to your audience.
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By Adam McFarland

Have you ever tried to read your local newspaper online? How about the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal? It just isn’t the same. Do you know why? Because articles meant for print don’t translate well to the web, and the rules that apply to writing content for the internet are different than those for print. What constitutes quality content offline does not necessarily constitute quality content online.

How the web is different:
Text is hard to read

Typical computer monitors have a resolution of 96 dpi (dots per inch). Compare that with a printout from a laser printer that has a resolution of 600 dpi, or a magazine page that can be upwards of 2400 dpi, and it’s not hard to figure out why the text on a computer places a strain on the eyes. According to the book Hot Text, Web Writing That Works, by Jonathan and Lisa Price, “because text is more difficult to read on-screen, people often read slower, comprehend less, recall less, and do less in response.”
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I’m using this post to keep a running list of the top ten methods which I feel are the best strategies for building links to a website. This list is based on my own experience of building links to my sites throughout the years. It’s important to keep in mind that when it comes to SEO, nothing is set in stone. SEO is a cat-and-mouse game, so I will revise this list from time to time as the field continues to evolve.

Please note that the order in which these methods are listed do not necessarily reflect their order of effectiveness. Some methods may work better than others for certain sites.

1. Submit to web directories

Submitting to web directories is a vital part of every successful link building campaign. Apart from driving traffic to your website through direct referrals, web directories provide static, one-way links to your site, boosting your link popularity and improving your rankings on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

It’s important to note that not all directory listings are equal. Listings from trusted, established directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ are more valuable than those from the thousands of others on the net. All else being equal, a link from a directory focused on your site’s niche is worth more than one from a general directories.

Submit to both free and paid directories. Free directories provide one-way links to your site with no strings attached, but they can take forever to review your link. Paid listings can be a good investment if the fees are reasonable and the pages on which your link will reside have decent PRs. Your sites will be listed with fewer competing links on paid directories.

2. Write articles and press releases

Submitting your article to directories is a highly effective way to build one-way links to your site. First, you write a thoughtful and informative article on an topic in your area of expertise. Then you submit it to article directories to be read by the general public and reprinted on other web sites. Appended to the end of your article is a “resource box” which contain links to your site and email address.

While there are hundreds or even thousands of article directories on the web, you should focus on writing a high quality article and submitting to a handful of the more popular ones. Having your article published on a top directory can be worth more than a hundred less reputable ones. If you write something that people find useful, they may pick it up and reprint it on their blogs, newsletters, etc. This is how a quality article propagates virally in cyberspace– it virtually distributes itself without your having to manually submit to a thousand article directories.

3. Exchange links with related sites

Online forums like Digitalpoint are an excellent place to find reciprocal linking partners. Avoid sending out spammy e-mail solicitations like those generated by many SEO software programs. I get dozens of these everyday.

4. Make use of social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites help bring together internet users from every corner of the world into a virtual global village. Submitting content to sites like Digg.com, YouTube.com and Del.icio.us can bring lots of visitors in a hurry.

It’s important to understand that sites like Digg and YouTube are not necessarily shock sites. Although there is some publicity to be gained from the shock value of an article or video, one must not resort to tasteless and offensive materials to gain attention. There is only so much value in the attention gotten by being the village idiot.

5. Buy text links on other sites

Although link buying is somewhat an unnatural way to build links, it may be the only way to increase your link popularity if your site is not unique or interesting enough to get people to link to you on their own. Most commercial sites fall into this category.

You should buy links in a way that simulates natural linking as much as possible. Buy text links from sites that are related to yours. Vary anchor texts and descriptions. Buy links from internal as well as home pages. Buy links from both high- and low-PR sites (which can be gotten at a bargain prices).

6. Participate in online forums

Sharing knowledge can be a very powerful way to establish your online presence and credibility. If you check your backlinks on search engines like Google and Yahoo!, you may notice that a number of them come from the signatures of forum posts– that is, if you post in forums. Most forums allow signature links. I don’t participate in forums that don’t as allowing them is the least the forums can do to compensate me for contributing to their contents.

7. Ask webmasters of related sites to links to yours

This often overlooked strategy can be a great source of “natural” one-way inbound links. I have gotten many of my links this way. The days are long gone when all you had to do to get people to link to you was to have a decent website out there. Nowadays you have to be more proactive by approaching other webmasters and asking them to link to you.

Do a search on Google on the keywords that you want to target. Visit the sites on the first few pages of the search results to see if they link to other sites (look for “links” or “resources” pages). Then write to the ones that you think might be interested in linking to your site. If your site is seen as a complement rather than a direct competitor to the site you want to be linked from, you stand a higher chance of getting a positive response.

8. Ask vendors and clients to link to your site

I once bought a $350 script package and asked my vendor if they could feature my site as site made with their script. They obliged and gave me a PR7 text link from their site. Since the link is worth at least $40 a month, my initial investement for the script has paid for itself many times over. Besides the SEO benefits, it is responsible for thousands of visitors to my site a month through direct clicks. The moral of the story: don’t be afraid to ask. The worse that could happen is that they say “no”.

9. Blogging

Setting up a blog is a no-brainer. Even if you’ve no web designing experience whatsoever, you have a blog up and running in no time. Blogs allows for a more informal setting to get your words across. So, it’s much easier to write a blog entry than an article to submit to article directories. Use your blog to share knowledge, voice opinions, connect with others with similar interests, and of course, to link to your other sites.

Avoid spamming blog networks like Blogger and MySpace. These spam blogs (”splogs”) are a waste of time as they will not get much attention from people and will yield little, if any, SEO benefits. Write about something you know and have a genuine interest in. Focus on quality rather than quantity.

10. Content is king

Yes, content is still king. In fact, content is by far the most important of the ten strategies I’ve mentioned. Having fresh, unique, engaging content is an excellent way to attract natural linking from other sites. This is the type of links that search engines like.

You may have heard of the buzz phrase, link-baiting, that is being tossed around in the SEO community nowadays. The idea is to get others to link to you voluntarily, perhaps by causing some type of sensation or controversy on YouTube, Digg, the message boards, or whatever. Link-baiting, in my opinion, is no more than a new play on the old “content is king” mantra.

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Honorable Mentions:

(These are the strategies that didn’t quite make the Top Ten list but are nevertheless deserving of consideration. Some of them may at one point have been in the top ten but had since been removed to make room for a new one.)

Write testimonials and reviews

Writing a glowing review about a product or service and submitting to your vendor or service provider can give you a very high quality link back to your site. But this strategy can prove time-consuming as many vendors publish only a handful of testimonials from their customers. Don’t waste your time by sending a testimonial to a vendor who does not have a “Testimonials” page on their site. When submitting a review or testimonial, don’t forget to mention to your vendor that they should be feel free to publish your comments on their site (along with a link to your site).

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Top Ten List Change Log:

v.1.0.1 (07/05/11) Minor edit

v.1.0.5 (07/05/16) Moderate edit

v.1.1.0 (07/06/06) Strategy #7, “Write testimonials and reviews” replaced with “Ask webmasters of related sites to links to yours”. “Testimonials” moved to “Honorable Mentions”.