Stop Duplicate Titles!
Niki brought up a great point in his article below. ActiveRain will start to float down on the scale of credibility if duplicate titles start appearing. Take a quick read and see what you can do to keep us in the top where SEO is concerned.
In our efforts to keep ActiveRain highly SEO friendly and to get our member blogs to the top of the search engines, we are working with a well-known SEO consultant here in Seattle. As I had mentioned previously, Google is frequently running its user experience and content optimization algorithm called Panda. Panda targets content farms and duplicate content and then ranks those site lower in the search results as Google believes that those sites have search spam.
Our consultant Susan found a number of interesting things within the 3 million pages of content indexed by the search engines.
MANY of our members will publish blogs with the same titles week after week. Examples include: Wordless Wednesday, Friday Funny, Market Update, etc. I understand why our members do this, like a regular column in a newspaper, BUT this often confuses the search engines. Even though the content of the blog post is different, since the title is the same AND used by many members of ActiveRain, the search engines could get confused and could label these posts as SPAM.
So, what to do? Very simple: Add the date to the title of your blog post or add additional description. Examples:
- Wordless Wednesday July 20, 2011: Blue Ocean and Grey Skies
- Market Update: Bellevue, WA July 20, 2011
- Friday Funny - A Laughing Horse
A small amount of extra text will prevent a world of confusion AND protect the content and our domain authority at ActiveRain!
Please re-blog and share so we can get the word out.
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