Google's Duplicate Content Filter - Urban Legend?

If you are on a blog like writingup, then yes, use original content, and ping after every post.

I have posted at five major blog sites for three years. I am not big here - yet, but I make more money from this blog because of the traffic.
However, your personal website is different.

The Duplicate Content Penalty

Let’s look at the “Duplicate Content Penalty.” It has been around for years, and haunts society like an urban legend.

It is feared despite the near total lack of reasonable proof that it exists in the form that most web owners understand.

The Penalty suggests that if my site has the same content as yours, one will be penalized.

Then, you do a Google search and what comes up as #1 on the search? An article directory, and an article that has 15000 downloads.

As usual, Google's duplicate content penalty has nothing to do with duplicate content. And it’s not a 'real penalty. It’s just a by-product of how the search engines work.

What happens is 'authority' sites get ranked. So, your little site with 100 articles on how to make the world's best short bread has the same article on mixing batter as a massive, 10 000 page website that focuses on cooking cookies - they get ranked - you don't. This is not a penalty, it is the 'natural consequences of living in the net environment.'

But, let's say that you've dutifully posted your article on 50 000 other websites, with an inbound link to a single article (never your index page) - then wham - you've just knocked the poor cooking cookies website off the charts.
What to do --- What to do?

You can do two things.

1. Put new content on your site weekly. Syndicate actively. And build links.
2. Toss the whole thing and become a Social Networking expert like Sharon Hurley Hall - and laugh at the search engine crawlers all the way to the bank.





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New Google Toolbar

Have you downloaded the new Google tool bar. If not, you will probably do so after reading this post. I put the toolbar on my new system, and just copied over the old system, on my other computer. Both methods worked.

The toolbar you want is the Google Toolbar 2008

Spyware

This includes a spyware software package that cleared 271 trackers and 4 malwar from my son's computer. It also includes a free- but fairly useless version of Norton, but, take it anyway. You never know when it will route out spyware and help your computer.

Social Networking Tools

You really want it for the social networking tools. It does not have stumbleupon - yet. You still need to download that toolbar, but you can download a delicious, dig, and technorati widget. When you find a page you like, just TAG them. When you are in a network, tagging articles becomes super easy.

In fact, just copy the first few 'intro' lines from the article and paste that into the description line. It may take some time to set up, but trust me. It has already saved me time.

Blogger Resources

I also added the blogger widget, so I could find my blogs. Other widgets I included were the spell check, youtube, yahoo home page (which is my home page), Facebook, Readdit (great for research), and most important....

VOTE NOW TOOL

That is right. Google has now gotten on the WEB2.0 bandwagon and included a tool that lets users vote for a web page - in essence - effecting page rank. I am sure that it is much more advanced than it looks ( a happy/a sad smiley) but time will tell.

Do You Use Drupal or Wordpress?

Running an online business is frustrating. I know that there are several people here running IT businesses that can add their own horror stories to this blog post.

Building a web platform (website) on a software program that promises to do 10 times what you need, and then only produces half of what you need - and that is with continual updates, bug reports, and a multitude of widgets and plug ins. We did that this year - twice.

Then there are programmers. I can say one name Bxxca and a cold child will run down the spine of any TE at www.inspiredauthor.com who was with us about 15 months ago. Yes, the programmer who did half the job and then demanded more money than my car is worth to finish, that is after we found porn running out of the back end of our server. That hit our Page Rank hard for a good long time.

I have been trying to hire a programmer for months at places like ifreelance. Most of the time I get people who want to be paid to learn their trade. When asked, they don't know the software program - but that is no problem..they are use to being paid to learn. I can't afford that. I doubt many of you can.

Then comes a good day. You find someone that actually knows what you are talking about. I found someone like that in Sheldon www.gamedevguru.com who is not expensive, because he doesn't need to spend fifteen hours figuring out the software before he gets started. He did more on my www.inspiredauthor.com in 2hours than anyone else I've met.

I wanted to let you know about him, one - because he not only knows Drupal but he is great with Worpress, too. I know that many of you are on wordpress - which is a good content management system (as Sharon HH has taught me :).

So, next time you are stuck, want to do something new, want to fix a bug. Don't panic - there is someone who can help you at: www.gamedevguru.com

Compare Web Hosting Services

One question most new web owners tackle is the hosting problem. Trust me, I've been on every level. From buying into a great marketing campaign, only to find that the company is a reseller and doesn't know what they are doing, to owning virtual server space and hiring a programmer to run things (expensive!).

I've been through several hosting companies. Now I use siteground. I can host all of my sites from one dashboard. The service is great. In fact, in a year I only heard of them failing to fix a problem once, and that was a programming problem.

They install scripts free, from wordpress to moodle. And they have alwasy fixed my small problems - like when a script stops working. In fact, they are so good at fixing problems, I've only paid programmers $100 this year! And that was for improving, not fixing.

All of this for a cost of $70 a year for my first site, and about $50 a year for the rest of the sites.

I haven't moved to a dedicated server yet, because my bandwidth allotment is more than it was on the dedicated server, and I have less 404 messages - meaning that the system isn't clogging with traffic. In fact, at one site that claimed to be one of the top 10 in the country, I had 20% 404 messages!!!

They use Cpanel, with excelent stat information, more than 30 scripts for blogs and websites, chats, newsletters, forums, etc - everything you need.

There is a good reason why this site is the #1 hosting site for many of the top ecommerce scripts.



Most important, I have never been hacked, but at the same time, there is no probelm with search engines. I found out - the hard way - that many resllers or 'amateur' hosting services work through Internet companies which make it difficult for search engines.

In fact, our response from Google changed from 2 - 3 months, to days, after switching from the other 'big host' to siteground.

However, to be fair. Godaddy is a better place for newbies. You can phone about everything, you can get 'instant' websites, and they will help you with problems - but they are more expensive. While siteground does offer a domain service - I still manage my domains through godaddy. One thing I did learn, is that many resellers work for godaddy-which gives them the right to say they are the biggest.

Making Your Blog Template Look Right

Sometimes a blog page doesn't look right. You may have put three scripts into the HTML box on blogger, or onto your web page code.

One problem bloggers face when adding their blog to directories is that they get long lists of blog names. This is okay if the code is at the bottom of the page, but not if it is in the sidebar (the menu at the side of the page).

This problem can also mess up a page when using affiliate codes.

First - make sure your code is not wider than the column. If the widget or code will not appear at all, then you need to select the code for a smaller widget.

(A widget is the small picture that advertises. At the top of this blog - the 'vote for this blog' picture is a widget)

One way to fix this problem is to add the code

after the script. This will tell the HTML to leave two blank lines UNDER the first script. This way your widgets and affiliate codes will appear in a straight column with 2 blank spaces between.

If the

code does not work then try

which tells the HTML page to start a new paragraph.

Stay out of the 'edit template' feature if possible. Most of today's blogs work on 'blocks' that let you paste your scripts into these. If you do need to go into your edit template make sure you copy and paste the template in MS Wordpad before working on the template.