Archive: September, 2008

Most webmasters and search marketing specialists view the guidelines posted at Google Webmaster Central as “the rules” outlining techniques acceptable to Google. The Google guidelines are in fact the only actual written rules universally recognized through-out the SEO sector though they tend to be regarded more like municipal bylaws than federal, state or provincial legal code. Nevertheless, Google makes the rules for how their search enigne works and breaking those rules can have far reaching consequences. Given the extreme importance of Google to our clients, SEOs tend to respect Google’s civil bylaws.

Two guidelines SEOs perceived as being among the most important to Google have recently changed. The first covers duplicate content, the second covers dynamic URLs.

Duplicate Content
From canonical issues and poor website architecture to outright content theft, dupe content is rampant on the web. Sometimes it happens by mistake and sometimes it is copied and republished on purpose.

For Google, duplicate content presents a number of potential problems. When Google perceives several documents containing the same content, it has to determine which of those documents is the most relevant to search-users’ queries. It also has to decide which incidents of duplicate content have value to web-users and which incidents are not useful. News and information posts, for instance, are often replicated from site to site with good reason and honest intent.