Weekly SEO news: 11 April 2017
Welcome to the latest issue of our newsletter!

Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please forward this newsletter to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. How to check your web pages for duplicate content (and improve your rankings at the same time)

Duplicate content is an issue for many webmasters. Although there is no penalty for having duplicate content on your website, Google's ranking algorithms filter duplicate content so that it can look like a penalty.

duplicate content

What is duplicate content?

Google's definition of duplicate content:

"Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin."

Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

  • Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
  • Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
  • Printer-only versions of web pages

What's the problem with duplicate content?

Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a 'regular' and 'printer' version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, Google will choose one of them to list.

If the content of a page can be found on multiple pages, Google only displays one of these pages in the search results. Unfortunately, this might not be the page that you want to see.

How to find duplicate content on your website

The Website Audit tool in SEOprofiler makes it easy to find duplicate content on your web pages. The Website Audit tool analyzes all pages of your site and it shows you the pages that contain duplicate content:

Quickly find duplicate content

Click the 'Show pages' button on the page to get the different pages that contain the duplicate content.

How to fix duplicate content problems

Removing duplicate content from your pages will have a positive influence on the rankings of your web pages. There are several things that you can do to avoid duplicate content problems:

  • Use 301 redirects to redirect visitors to the correct pages on your website.
  • Always use the same link to link to a page, i.e. do not link to /page, /page/index.htm and /page/.
  • Use the rel=canonical tag to inform Google about the preferred version of a page. Details about the attribute can be found here. For most duplicate content issues, this is the best solution.
  • Use country-specific domains for country-specific content. Use domain.de instead of domain.com/de.
  • Syndicate your content carefully. If the websites that show your content are more popular than your own websites, they will be shown in Google's search results.
  • Avoid long boilerplate texts on all pages. Better link to a page with the details.
  • Avoid similar pages. If you have several pages with similar content, consider merging them into one page.

In addition to the Website Audit tool, SEOprofiler offers many more tools that help you to get better rankings on Google and other search engines. Create your SEOprofiler account now and check your website for duplicate content:

Try the audit tool now

2. Internet marketing news of the week

GoogleWas there a Google algorithm update on April 17th & 18th?

"There seems to have been a Google algorithm update. Not at Fred, Penguin or Panda levels but an smaller but yet significant update that caused both a lot of chatter in the community as well as set most of the automated tracking tools off.

We have threads at both WebmasterWorld and Black Hat World with the discussion. [...] more and more are saying they have seen some significant changes. The update seemed to have lasted about two days."


Google: how we fought webspam - webspam report 2016

"Website security continues to be a major source of concern. Last year we saw more hacked sites than ever [...] We continued to see that sites are compromised not just to host webspam. We saw a lot of webmasters affected by social engineering, unwanted software, and unwanted ad injectors. [...]

Since more people are searching on Google using a mobile device, we saw a significant increase in spam targeting mobile users. In particular, we saw a rise in spam that redirects users, without the webmaster’s knowledge, to other sites or pages, inserted into webmaster pages using widgets or via ad units from various advertising networks."


GoogleGoogling gives us answers—but deprives us of intelligence

"We reveal our deepest inner thoughts, fears, and desires to search-engine technologies, replacing the intimate human services otherwise offered by teachers, doctors, librarians, friends, confidants, psychiatrists, religious representatives, and respected elders.

This problem is underscored by worrying reports that document UK students citing 'fake news' as objective facts in schoolwork and classroom debates, US sixth graders being taught 'news literacy' out of necessity, and the global epidemic of a 'post-truth' era that still finds no clear solutions or remedies."

+++ SEARCH +++ ENGINE +++ NEWS +++ TICKER +++

  • Google’s Featured Snippets are not only often wrong, they’re also damaging to small businesses.
  • Google is a monopoly - and it's crushing the internet.
  • Is it time to break up Google?
  • Google pushes fake news, hate-speech workshops on UK teens.
  • Bing refines its copyright removals process.
  • Google plans ad-blocking feature in popular Chrome browser.
  • Google Home now supports multiple users.
  • Google shows “suggested clip” feature in search results.
  • Google introduces automated smart display campaigns.

3. Previous articles