Matt Cutts Duplicate Content

Brett had signed me up for a site review panel featuring Greg Boser, Tim Mayer, Danny Sullivan, Todd Friesen,  and Jake Bailey, with Jake moderating.

The idea behind a site review panel is that people volunteer their sites and receive advice on how to improve them. We discussed a promotional gifts company, the Dollar Stretcher website, a real estate company in Las Vegas, a chiropractor, a real estate licensing company, a computer peripheral site, a high-end sound store, and a day spa in Arizona. In his PubCon recap, Barry said I ripped on sites.

For most of the sites, I tried to give positive advice, but I wasn’t afraid to point out potential problems.

Once again, I sat at the end and set up my wireless and VPN so that I could use all my Google tools. The promotional gifts company had a couple of issues. For one thing, I was immediately able to find 20+ other sites that also belonged to the promotional gifts person.

The other sites offered overlapping content and overlapping pages on different URLs. The larger issue was searching for a few words in a description and quickly finding dozens of other sites with the same descriptions. We discussed the difficulty of adding value to feeds when you run multiple sites.

One thing to do is to find ways to incorporate user feedback, such as through forums or reviews. The wrong thing to do is to try to add a few extra sentences or scramble a few words or bullet points to avoid detection of duplicate content. If I can spot duplicate content in a minute with a search, Google has time to do more in-depth duplicate detection in its index.

Next up was the Dollar Stretcher.

I’d actually heard of this site before (stretcher.com), and everything I checked, both on and off-page, looked fine. The site owner said that Google was doing fine on this site, but Yahoo! didn’t seem to like it. Greg Boser managed to find a sitemap-type page that listed hundreds of articles, but in my opinion, it only looked good because the site has been live since 1996.

They had tons of original articles that they had written over the years. So, how should a web admin make a sitemap on their site when they have hundreds of articles? My advice would be to break the sitemap up into your pages.

Instead of hundreds of links all on one page, you could organize your articles chronologically (each year could be a page), alphabetically, or by topic. Danny and Todd noticed a mismatch between the uppercase URL titles on the live pages and the lowercase URL titles, as shown in Yahoo’s Site Explorer. This led a few people to wonder if cloaking was occurring.

The site was definitely hitting a “this is a legit site” chord for me, and I didn’t think they were cloaking, so I checked with a quick wget and also told Googlebot to fetch the page. It all checked out–no cloaking going on to Google.

I gently tried to suggest that it might be a Site Explorer issue, which a few people took as a diss. No diss was intended to Site Explorer; I think it’s a fine way to explore URLs. I don’t believe so. Stretcher.com wasn’t trying to pull any tricks by lowercasing their titles to search engines (not that cloaking a title to lowercase would help a site anyway).

The real estate site was functional, featuring around 100 pages about various projects and 10 pages with information about us, including contact details. It was also quite close to being a brochureware site. Nothing about the site was compelling or exciting. I recommended looking for good ways to attract links, such as surveys, articles about the high construction levels in Vegas, or contests.

The goal is to create a little buzz, rather than standard corporate brochureware sites. Linkbait doesn’t have to be sneaky or cunning; great content can be linkbait as well, if you let people know about it. The chiropractor’s site looked good.

Danny Sullivan made some good points, saying they wanted to show up for a keyword phrase, but that phrase didn’t appear on the site’s home page.

Think about what users will type (and what you want to rank for), and make sure to use those words on your page. The site owner was also using Comic Sans, a font that many people dislike. I recommended something more conservative for a medical story.

Greg Boser mentioned being aware of local medical associations and similar community organizations. I recommended local newspapers and gave the example that when my Mom shows up with a prepared article for her small hometown newspaper about a charity event, they’re usually happy to run it or something similar.

Don’t neglect local resources when promoting your site.

My favorite part of the real estate licensing site is that, in under a minute, I found over 50 other domains that this person had – everything from learning Spanish to military training. So, I have to say, “Let’s be frank, you and I: how many sites do you have?”

He paused for a while, then said “a handful.” After I ran through several of his sites, he agreed that he had quite a few. My quick take is that if you’re running 50 or 100 domains yourself, you’re fundamentally different from the chiropractor with his one site.

With that many domains, each domain doesn’t always get as much loving attention, and that can really show. Ask yourself how many domains you have, and if it’s so many that lots of domains end up a bit cookie-cutter-like.

Several times during the session, it was clear that someone had attempted to establish reciprocal links as a “quick hit” to boost their link popularity.

When I saw that in the backlinks, I tried to communicate that
1) It was immediately apparent to me, and therefore our algorithms can do a pretty good job of spotting excessive reciprocal links, and
2) In the instances that I looked at, the reciprocal links weren’t doing any good. I urged folks to spend more time looking for ways to make a compelling site that attracts viral buzz or word of mouth.

Compelling sites that are well-marketed attract editorially chosen links, which tend to help a site more.

The computer peripheral site had a few issues, but it was a solid site.

They had genuine links, for example, from. Lexa, I’m listing them as a place to buy their memory cards. When you’re a well-known site like that, it’s worth trying to find even more manufacturers whose products you sell. Links from computer part makers would be pretty good links, for example.

Instead of using the first 14-15 words of the description, the panel recommended truncating the keywords in the URL to ~4-5 words. The site also had session ID stuff, like “sid=te8is439m75w6mp,” that I recommended dropping if possible.

The site also had product categories, but URLs were like “/s-subcat-NETWORK~.html”. I think having “/network/” and then having the networking products in that subdirectory is a little cleaner.

The HiFi store was fine, but this was another example where someone had 40+ other sites.

Having lots of sites isn’t bad, but I’ve mentioned the risk that not all the sites get as much attention as they should. In this case, 1-2 of the sites were stuff like cheap-cheap-(something-related-to-telephone-calling).com.

Rather than containing any real content, most of the pages were pay-per-click (PPC) parked pages. When I checked the WHOIS records, they all listed “whois privacy protection service.”

That’s relatively unusual. Having lots of sites isn’t automatically bad, and having PPC sites isn’t automatically bad, and having whois privacy turned on isn’t automatically bad.

Still, once you get several of these factors all together, you’re often talking about a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who has a single site or so.

Closing out on a fun note, the day spa was done by someone who was definitely a novice.

The site owner seemed to have trouble accessing all the pages on the site, so she had loaded a ton of content onto the main page. But it was a real site, and it still ranked well at Yahoo! and Google.

The site owner said that she had been trying to find a good SEO for ages, so Todd guilted the audience and said, “Will someone volunteer to help out this nice person for free?” A whole mess of people raised their hands–good evidence that SEOs have big hearts and that this site owner picked the right conference to ask for help.

Okay, that’s a rundown of SEO feedback on some real-world sites, and this post is like a gajillion words long, so I’ll stop now and save more write-ups for later.

b: Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO