There has been quite a bit of news circulating within the Search industry lately, and some of this news may have an impact on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.  In case you haven’t heard, below is quick re-cap of two pieces of important information.

Back in August, I wrote a blog about Google’s Caffeine Update.  Recently, it was announced that this update will begin to be rolled out in 2010.  Not to worry, Matt Cutts reassured webmasters in his recent blog post that the improvements to Google’s indexing infrastructure won’t occur prior to January – after the holidays.  They will release Caffeine in one data center for monitoring, prior to the full roll out.

Previously there was a preview of Caffeine available.  This preview has now been removed and this Thank You note was kindly left:

“We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox”.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”
Stay tuned as this Caffeine update approaches!

Another important piece of information is that Matt Cutts announced that Google may be adding a new factor to the over 200 factors that are currently part of their organic ranking algorithm: website load time. If you’re currently an AdWords advertiser, you may be aware that page load time already plays a role in Quality Score. In an effort to improve searchers overall experience, this too may play a role with SEO in the future. If you are interested in finding out more about how to assess your pages’ speed, you can visit: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/.

Have you ever conducted a search for your company’s most popular keywords and wondered why your site doesn’t rank very well for a particular keyword?  The next time you come across this situation, take a look at the domain names that actually are ranking well.  What do they look like?  What you might find is something like the image below:

Do you see a theme?  Notice that for the search “bicycle tires”, the keywords bicycle and/or tires are located within the domain name. When keywords are within URLs, especially the main domain name, the search engines can more easily determine that the website as a whole is about that keyword. 

This is why including keywords in your URLs is so important from a ranking perspective.  It may even make the difference between being on the first page of the search results and being hidden a few pages deep.  If your website’s main domain name does not include keywords, keep this principle in mind as you build out new pages. Where possible, include the targeted keyword(s) in the URL. For example, www.example.com/bicycle-tires

Having keywords within URLs is only one of the many components of search engine optimization (SEO).  A few of the other important aspects include making sure that the search engines can crawl your website, that there are highly relevant sites with links to your site, that are no technical issues, and that there is enough content on the site’s pages.  When focusing on SEO, it’s important to note that there isn’t one thing that you need to do; it is all of the components combined that will provide the greatest results.

Duplicate content is an issue that’s common among many sites. A question that I hear frequently is, “what makes content duplicate to Google”? Google states, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar”.

You may have heard of duplicate content before, however, many site owners are not aware of the ways in which duplicate content can occur. Typically we see duplicate content created unintentionally, but we’ve also seen it deliberately created. On sites where it is not created in a manipulative manner, there are rarely penalties by the search engines. Instead, there is something that is often referred to as a duplicate content filter. This is where the search engines filter out duplicated pages so that they can provide the searcher diverse search results.

When search engines filter out duplicate pages, you as the publisher of the content have little control over which url or domain is displayed in the search results. That being said, I think it’s important to identify a few ways that we often see duplicate content.

1) www and non-www versions both index-able by the search engines. This is probably the most common occurrence of duplicate content.

• http://example.com/
• http://www.example.com/

2) Inconsistent link references throughout the site.

• http://www.example.com/page/
• http://www.example.com/page/home.htm
• http://www.example.com/page/index.htm

3) Different navigation paths.

• http://www.example.com/Samples/Browse/Things/Big/Small/index.php
• http://www.example.com/Samples/Browse/Things/Small/Big/index.php

4) Different sort orders.

• http://www.example.com/Samples/Browse/Things/Big/Small/index.php
• http://www.example.com/Samples/Browse/Things/Big/Small/index.php?sortby=rating

5) Printable versions of pages being accessible by the search engines.

6) Additional marketing domains that are not properly redirecting to the main website.

7) Different urls that are used to display various elements on the page.

8) Re-naming urls without deleting or properly implementing redirection rules.

Some ways to address duplicate content include redirecting multiple domains to the preferred or “canonical” version, using the canonical link tag, restricting access in your robots.txt file, etc. The best situation is of course a site that doesn’t create duplicate content in the first place. However, if you do have an existing site creating duplicate content, be sure that you utilize some of these handy work-arounds.