Recently I came across an article that caught my attention. It was an interesting read on creating content, and there was some good advice on writing original text. For example, keeping the copy relevant to the service or product offered on your site and writing an FAQ page, making sure to insert your key phrases. This is good honest advice that will work for the long run.

There was one part, however, that made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Here’s a quote, “Bear in mind, authorities and experts in a given field are often seeking collateral exposure, which you can provide them. The exercise is to find an article published online that contains content related to your industry and ask for permission to “reprint” it on your site.”

I must strongly disagree; reprinting articles from other sites can cause problems with duplicate content. When the search engines determine that the content on two different pages are duplicate, one will be chosen seemingly at random by the “duplicate content filter” in the algorithm and sent to the supplemental index (otherwise known as Google Hell). You are better off writing original content that refers to the article and providing a link to it.

If you are having trouble coming up with original content, you could consider implementing a blog on your site and discussing the issues that come up on a daily or weekly basis. You can also encourage you customers to comment on these blogs, which helps to create user generated content. If you’re still having trouble, consider contracting a professional copywriter who is trained in creating original text.

I will leave you with this thought, be very careful when seeking out advice about increasing the rankings and the traffic of your site. Although the advice you find may be well intentioned, it may inadvertently harm you. Always check and double check any information you find regarding SEO.

Are there broken links on your site? Have you removed some old pages while forgetting to clean up the links pointing to those pages? Did you change your file structure and leave some legacy links behind? You may not even know if you have these issues, but the search engines do.

Do these broken links affect your search engine rankings? Out of curiosity, I asked some colleagues in the industry this question and the general consensus was they don’t even worry about it as an organic factor, which leads me to think they do not believe this affects rankings. Well, I am fairly certain this is incorrect for a number of reasons. Broken links can degrade your rankings on a site wide basis. I recently wrote on the fact that search engines rank individual pages and not whole sites, but I also mentioned there are a few site wide ranking factors. I believe this is one of those factors.

Let’s set aside for a moment that having broken links on your site is bad for a wide variety of user experience reasons and focus on why it is bad specifically for search engine rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

SES has come and gone and it was a wealth of information. You can find some good coverage of the sessions at Search Engine Strategies ‘07 New York Session Coverage Roundup. For me, it’s the linking sessions that catch my attention.

What it basically comes down to is that quantity of links is no longer a major factor. Quality is what counts. It seems that the search engines are taking into account the user experience. This means that it is vital to acquire links that are relevant to your topic. Find the experts in your field, the authorities and get them to link to you. How do you do this? One way is submit articles to the industry forums and newsletters. Another is to use press releases and PR services to get your name out there. Just keep relevancy in mind… if it’s not related to your product or service, don’t do it.

Take some time to review the session coverage for Link Building Basics and Linking Strategies as they are filled with information and tools that you can use for improving your rankings through linking. One important thing to remember is that building links takes time, anytime I see a site that acquires a lot of links in a short period of time, I get suspicious. There is no quick fix, what we are aiming at is long term web presence and credibility.