Matt Cutts Reviewing SEO Mistakes At 2006 Pubcon
Google engineer Matt Cutts reviewed a couple of websites as real examples at the 2006 Pubcon in Vegas and gave advises on a number of common SEO mistakes.
Advise #1: Avoid duplicate content when you have multiple websites
When a single webmaster is in possession of multiple websites, one of the issues is that he is unlikely to focus and give the same good attention to all his websites. This can easily leave him in using duplicate content across many of his websites.
I was immediately able to find 20+ other sites 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 from a description quickly found dozens of other sites with the exact same descriptions. We discussed the difficulty of adding value to feeds when you’re running lots of sites.
The wrong thing to do is to try to add a few extra sentences or to scramble a few words or bullet points trying to avoid duplicate content detection. 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.
The right way is to get your audience to contribute new content.
One thing to do is to find ways to incorporate user feedback (forums, reviews, etc.).
Advise #2: Improve your sitemap structure
When you need to show too many links on your sitemap, it is better to create your sitemap as multiple sitemap pages than simply as one page.
So how should a webmaster make a sitemap on their site when they have hundreds of articles? My advice would be to break the sitemap up on 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.
Advise #3. One way links are better than reciprocal links
Reciprocal links cannot boost your website ranking.
It was readily apparent that someone had tried to do reciprocal links as a “quick hit” to increase their link popularity. When I saw that in the backlinks, I tried to communicate that 1) it was immediately obvious 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.
One way inbound links that can be acquired naturally is the future.
I urged folks to spend more time looking for ways to make a compelling site that attract viral buzz or word of mouth. Compelling sites that are well-marketed attract editorially chosen links, which tend to help a site more.
Matt suggested creating buzz is one way to attract natural inbound links.
There was nothing compelling or exciting about the (real estate) site. I recommended looking for good ways to attract links: surveys, articles about the crazy construction levels in Vegas, contests–basically just looking at ways to create a little buzz, as opposed to 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.
Advise #4: You should better watch out when you own multiple websites.
Nothing can really hurt until it shows an obvious pattern across all your websites.
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.com.
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, but once you get several of these factors all together, you’re often talking about a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who just has a single site or so.
Posted on December 8, 2006
Filed Under Google, Link Building, SEO |
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2 Responses to “Matt Cutts Reviewing SEO Mistakes At 2006 Pubcon”
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Hi Gordon,
Just browsing for SEO sites and chanced on your blog, your “Matt Cutts Reviewing SEO Mistakes At 2006 Pubcon” post is very, very good and until now I never realised there were synopses available of WMW conferences. Matt’s points are dead on, oustanding content and innovative strategies to attract genuine one-way links is definitely the way forward, although it can be frustrating educating clients about this, so many just want to build a site then have someone “SEO” it, it still needs to sink in that building content is per se the best way to do search engine optimization.
Thanks again, keep up the great work and wishing you every success,
Best Regards,
Jeremy
[...] Duplicated Content is one of the problems we all face on the web. Basically, duplicated content gives user a bad experience besides the major search engines do not value it. It makes things worse when you own all those websites that share very similar content. Google’s Matt Cutts reviewed some websites and warned about using duplicate content across your multiple websites at the 2006 Pubcon. [...]