Many companies today are starting blogs to help boost their SEO results. Blogs can be a great tool to introduce new content to the site in an easy to use fashion and without the resources of a web designer or knowledge of html. One great aspect of these blogs is the comments feature that allows users to post comments about your blog post. This is great because the comments are usually about the same topic as the post and can add a lot of good, indexable content to the page other than the main post.

But there is also a darker side of comments, the spam side. Blog comments are an easy way for people to spam links to their site because many people leave the option in WordPress “on” that auto approves comments. I know there have been many times that I had read a comment along the lines of “Great site, keep it up” or “Just surfed in and I love your site”. Sure they seem harmless, but comments allow the user to post his url and name with their comment. So the above two comments were posted by a person named “Buy Viagra Online” and were actually a link to an online pharmacy. This is not good for your site at all. Comments like this can put you into bad link neighborhoods and associate your site with theirs.

The problem is that not all comments are like this. The option to add your url is so other blogs can link back to their blogs. The idea of comments is great and the rewards of building a solid community outweigh the risks of possible spam. But if you are going to allow comments, you need to moderate them all. Check the users post; make sure it is relevant to the topic of your post and not a generic post. Generic posts can be a sign of an automated posting spider trying to spam blogs with open comments. Check the users name and url; you want to allow them to post their url because it is part of blogging but you should always visit the url a user gives to make sure you are ok linking to that site before approving the comment. Comments are one of the best things about blogging but if you are going to enable them make sure you moderate them properly.

I would like to share a few usability resources I have found that can quickly get you on your way to understanding your visitors and employing Best Practices for usability design.

www.useit.com
Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a patent holder and renowned usability guru. You can find invaluable reports as well as all the content from his free AlertBox newsletter.

Don’t Make Me Think (Book)
This book provides an easy to follow, non-technical, yet revealing perspective into what goes on in visitors’ minds when they see your site, from the first impressionable seconds to the interaction with navigation elements minutes later. It details many case studies and guides you with Best Practices for designing for visitors so that you won’t have to teach them to use your site–they’ll know instinctively and will not have to think. It’s a short, but thought-provoking read with suggestions that you will soon want to implement.

www.uxmatters.com
This organization produces an e-zine about usability and design issues. Some of the content is a theoretical, but you can take something away from every article. This site contains a glossary of usability-related terms and abbreviations, conference reviews and access to archived articles. Though they have been around for just two years, there is a lot of useful content.

www.usability.gov
See your tax dollars at work. Uncle Sam has compiled research and guidelines for developing usable web sites. They include topics on everything from planning to designing to testing and refining your website. You can also find newsletters, articles and events related to site usability. They also sell their Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines book, which includes contributions from ‘experts from across government, industry, and academia.’

www.challishodge.com
A blogger with a large archive talks about ‘the user experience, design and strategy’ while applying news of current events in a broad range of topics from art to nanotechnology to Word of Mouth Marketing. In addition to the informative and interesting blog posts, lists of organizations, other blog sites, books and resources can also be found.

www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/index.htm
Poynter Institute runs tests on visitors’ eye movement behavior while reading multimedia and news-related websites. This site, as well as http://eyetrack.poynter.org/, gathers the findings and helps you understand what design decisions can help your site visitors look, and then hopefully click, where you want them to. Though this information is specifically pertaining to news websites, you should be able to apply the findings about images, font size and information recall to your design.

www.webstyleguide.com
Originally published by Yale University, Webstyleguide.com presents a logical, prioritized approach to Best Practices in web design with an emphasis on user-centered design. The guidelines start with a discussion on the design process and design goals, and continue with interface, site and page design, and then delves into visual elements and editorial style.

psychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/default.htm
This resource’s goal is to assist you in designing a website for user, and does so by combining and presenting knowledge gained from many researchers on human interaction with interfaces. The Software Usability Research Laboratory, the laboratory responsible for this site’s content, includes research from the previously mentioned Poynter University and Neilson. In this resource, along with its sister site, surl.org, much of the text is supported by parenthetical notations so you can find the original publication of a researcher’s findings. Though this site was last updated in March 2003, and some of the suggestions are no longer in use, surl.org’s newsletter is current as of July 2007.

Having duplicate content on your site may not seem like it could cause a problem in search engine indexes. After all, the more keyword relevant pages that a site has in indexes, the more likely that a page from the site will appear in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for that keyword, right? It’s true that duplicate content in search engine indexes is not the worst problem that a site can have – it’s infinitely better than no content, for example. However, serving up duplicate content to search engines can cause problems. This is because although the major search engines are dedicated to crawling the entire web and indexing every single page, they also are constantly striving to present as many unique and relevant results to their users as possible. To do this, they have to filter out duplicate content particularly when it occurs on the same site.

How do duplicate content filters work? Every search engine is different and this is an aspect of search engines that is changing all the time. In fact, Google recently made major changes to the way they handle duplicate content. Prior to fall of 2007, they maintained two indexes: a main index where most search results pages were called from and a supplementary index. Pages in the supplementary index were much less likely to appear in the SERPS. Google has now eliminated the distinction between indexes and started using other methods to ensure that pages from a single site do not overwhelm the search engine results. Some of these include:

• Grouping duplicate URLs into a “cluster” and consolidating their properties including inbound links in one URL which is then displayed in the SERPS.
• Only displaying a maximum of two results from any one domain (including sub-domains) in the results pages and providing a link to display more results if the searcher wishes.

So, if Google is taking care of this issue, why should we care? There are two main reasons:

1. Search engines do not crawl all the pages of a site on every visit. How often a site is subject to a “deep crawl” depends on how important the search engines view the site, but even very important sites are not fully crawled every time. How many pages are crawled can be dependent on how much time the search engines have allocated to crawling your site. If they are wasting time collecting the same content over and over rather than crawling and indexing the unique pages, some of your content may not be included in search engine results as quickly as you would like.
2. When Google chooses which URL to display, they may not be considering issues like which page has the best title or meta tags or URL filename. If you have gone to the trouble of optimizing a specific page for search engines, your work is all for naught if they choose to display a non-optimized page in the SERPs instead.

The bottom line is that a well designed site that takes care to serve only one version of a page to both search engines and visitors will be crawled more efficiently and will be less confusing for visitors to navigate. Furthermore, as the site owner, you will choose which pages will be displayed and not some anonymous algorithm. Google has provided some tips on how to streamline your site and avoid duplicate content issues. How important this is to your site can depend on many factors, but taking any advantage you can when competing for those all-important first page positions is just good sense.