A number of websites are (or were) planning to "go black" this week while the U.S. Congress discusses issues related to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The website blackouts are part of a larger social media effort against the bills that our Greg Finn wrote about this morning on Marketing Land. You may be thinking about joining the website blackout movement, but yikes ... what about the SEO implications? How do you take your site offline in protest without messing up your visibility in Google's search results? Well, Google's Pierre Far shared several tips [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | SEO: Blocking Spiders | SEO: Duplicate Content | Top News

In what's now to be a monthly update on search changes, a new Google "Inside Search" blog post today tells us that life is getting tougher for those with parked domains, life may get better for those plagued by scraper sites and those hoping to "push down" negative listings may have a tougher challenge. New Monthly Search Update The news comes from a post to the Google Inside Search blog, itemizing ten search-related changes that have been made. Google did a similar post like this last month, and now it confirms this will be a monthly update on what it considers to be noteworthy changes b [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | SEO: Duplicate Content | SEO: Host Crowding & Clustering | SEO: Spamming | Top News

Today, Google webmaster tools has launched a new message alert to let site owners know when a particular URL doesn't appear because Google sees it as duplicate of a URL on a different domain. In the blog post announcing the feature and in an in-depth help topic, they provide details on how they identify duplicate clusters of content and choose a "canonical" version of that cluster to display in search results. "When we discover a group of pages with duplicate content, Google uses algorithms to select one representative URL for that content. A group of pages may contain URLs from the same site [...]

Related Topics: Features: General | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Duplicate Content | Top News

Whether you are taking over a new multinational account as an agency, or maintaining your company's global Web presence as an in-house SEO, being able to quickly identify internal duplicate content is a vital skill. Duplicate content is a big problem for SEO for a number of reasons. If you've been following this multinational series, you'll know that some of the biggest gains to be had in SEO today come from fine tuning your SERP sales message to make the landing page you target to a search term convert at a much higher rate than average. If you are unable to ensure that your landing pag [...]

Related Topics: Multinational Search | SEO - Search Engine Optimization | SEO: Duplicate Content

You may have read in SEOMoz a few years ago that link building is unnecessary for mobile rankings. When it comes to smartphone search engine results, data suggests otherwise. When I took a random sample of 11 of the most popular mobile queries and examined the characteristics of the top 5 Google smartphone results for each query, the average domain authority (using SEOMoz metrics) for the first five positions was 83/100, and the first result (on average) had as many links pointing to the first listing as it did to listings 2 through 5. Furthermore, there was only one site in the sample t [...]

Related Topics: Mobile Search | SEO - Search Engine Optimization | SEO: Duplicate Content | SEO: Mobile Search