Dangerous Thinking

Questions about duplicate content are probably the most common of all I get asked. For example:

Can I use the same content across two sites on two different domains?

Can I use the same content in my meta tags across all the pages on my site?

Is it all right to use the same Title on all my pages?

Out comes one of Rosam’s SEO Rules of Thumb. The one that says if it’s lazy, the search engines will probably skewer you for it.

Honestly, the search engines will either penalise you or ignore your efforts. So why bother?

Create some real value in your site and everyone will love you.

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Why not follow Dangerous Thinking on Twitter? I’m http://twitter.com/seocopyandstrat.

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Sure. Frequent updates to a site are A GOOD THING SEO-wise. Let’s get that out of the way now. And they’re an excellent way to encourage people to make a return visit.

But they’re not necessary if you’re focused on getting top page positions on natural search. There are plenty of wholly static sites we’ve worked on for clients that perform really well on the search engines. Sometimes just with a concentrated burst of off-site activities after I’ve written some good SEO copy, sometimes with ongoing off-site promotion.

An annual content refresh can be enough, if the other measures are effective and properly executed.

Why is this important? Well, I’ve seen many companies getting their knickers in a twist about how they’re going to produce regular content, or whether they should have a blog on their site because they’ve read that they need to do this to get those high SE positions.

Instead, a good SEO supplier will be able to take the whole task off their hands, so they may not need to make a continuous commitment to working on the site, or to having an out-of-house writer contributing day in, day out.

So think about what you want to achieve and your resources before committing to produce often-updated content.

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A few weeks ago I asked Is localisation affecting your search engine performance? Obviously, moving a site with a .com domain to a UK-based server will solve the problem of getting the google.co.uk UK rankings.

But my colleague Paul Silver wondered if we we could find another way of establishing this blog’s UK provenance. We ended up registering Dangerous Thinking on Google Local, so Google knew that the blog had a real physical UK location.

We sat back and waited to see if Google Search picked up on the Google Local registration. Some six weeks later, it hadn’t, so we’ve concluded Google Search does not reference Google Local.

Whether Google will join up the two services in the future, I don’t know - it seems very logical to. But they don’t appear to work together now.

Edit (20 November 2007): Burrowing back into my RSS feeds (I always read the most up-to-date ones first), I found Google’s answer to search localisation in a post on the Webmaster Central Blog back in August called Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts.

Here we go:

Does location of server matter? I use a .com domain but my content is for customers in the UK.

In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, “.co.uk ” domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server’s IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

So, there we are. IP and top-level domain.

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Yesterday, I mentioned our SEO presentation this Saturday.

Today, I’d like to give a plug for Farm Hack Day on Saturday 17th November, when Paul dons his geek hat. I’ll leave it to him to explain:

Hack Day is a chance for web developers and designers to get together and work on small, fun projects, e.g. a new widget for their website. During the day people will learn from each other and show off their skills in a friendly, slightly geeky environment.

This Hack Day is organised by members of the Brighton Farm freelancers group. The day will be free, supported by sponsors. Tickets will be allocated through EventWax.

I hope to see you there

Paul Silver

I think I’ll be there, too.

Secure your place here.

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Paul and I are part of Start-Up Day this Saturday, organised by £5 App.

We’ll be talking about SEO and assessing people’s sites.

If you’re in the Brighton area, why not come along?

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I encourage my clients who blog to blog often. It’s a good idea, as long as the quality doesn’t falter, of course

I’ve just failed to post for almost a whole month owing to extreme busyness. My apologies.

Let’s hope I can get properly back on stream again.

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An alarming number of people and companies using Pay Per Click (PPC) are quite happy to just buy traffic. Maybe even up to £2000 a month just to get people to glance at the site. And that’s a lot of money for a small business. Why aren’t they taking it that step further and measuring the returns on their PPC investment?

I mentioned this to my old university chum Peter Purton last week, when we were talking about Internet advertising, and he seemed less perturbed than me. I guess, as a person with a background in dead-tree publishing, he feels more comfortable with his observation that people are used to not knowing whether their advertising works or not. And that mindset is simply carried over into the Internet (and hence into Google’s bottom line, I added), where they buy traffic blindly.

My advice is, at the very least, to set up conversion tracking in Adwords or YSM and keep an eye on the cost per conversion. Compare that to your profit on each sale. You may be in for a shock. In Pete’s former newsletter business he’d have been looking at the lifetime value of the customer, though, so you may want to compare the conversion cost with the repeat business you’d be expecting from them.

Even better, set up a Google Analytics account, and some Goals and really start to understand what’s happening with your PPC - and other online marketing - spend.

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Thanks to everyone who came to hear me talk about SEO Copywriting in Brighton last night. It was standing room only in Madgex’s boardroom - thanks guys, and thanks to Rosie Sherry and the SkillSwap team for arranging everything.

I promised to make my presentation available today. A PDF can now be downloaded from the Web Positioning Centre SEO Publications page. I hope you find some of the other articles there useful, too.

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As Google tries to make its search results more relevant, we’re seeing how content, TLD (eg .com, .co.uk etc) and host location are interacting to influence natural search results.

I’m not going to give any secrets away about our clients, but we’ve seen unexpected results for a number of sites and for this blog.

Let’s concentrate on Dangerous Thinking, because I’m happy to discuss what’s happening here. I live and work in the UK, but back when dinosaurs roamed the blogosphere, I registered dangerous-thinking.com, thinking that was more desirable than dangerous-thinking.co.uk.

This blog is hosted at A Small Orange in the States, as they came very highly recommended as a host for WordPress-based blogs. I have no arguments against ASO; how they can supply such excellent support for such a small hosting fee, I’ll never know.

But Google now looks at the .com and hosting arrangements and feels that the content here is relevant to a US-based audience, and will tend to list it on Google.com, rather than Google.co.uk.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I welcome US readers - in fact, anyone, from anywhere - here, but this blog has the ultimate purpose of attracting business to myself and Web Positioning Centre, and even our clients based abroad all have links to the UK. So I want this blog to rank well on Google.co.uk, as the UK is where our business comes from.

Now, as you may have seen on a previous post, I discovered that it is the top UK blog for ‘SEO Copywriting’, so things are obviously not as straightforward as I outlined above.

Let’s get the easy bit out of the way. The reason that this blog shows up on Google.co.uk searches is that it has a lot of content from the past that talks about where I live and the area we do business in - there are a huge number of references to Sussex, as well as some to London.

I dug a bit deeper by running a report on a whole bundle of key phrases to see how Dangerous Thinking performs on Google.com, Google.co.uk (Web) and Google.co.uk (UK). While it performs adequately on Google.com, its performance on Google.co.uk was a surprise. It performs very well on ‘Web’, but does not feature in the top 50 places on ‘UK’.

I conclude that the .com domain and US hosting is ruling it out of the most focused UK searches. I’ve run two tests now, some weeks apart, with the same result. So I’m planning to move Dangerous Thinking back to the UK. I hope that I don’t lose my US traffic, but the scientist in me wants to see what happens anyway.

I wonder who can recommend a reliable, reasonably-priced UK hosting outfit that runs cPanel? I want to transfer the blog in one easy hit.

Edit, 25 September 2007: My colleague, Paul Silver just made a very valid point. There are rather a lot of Dangerous Thinkings in bold in this piece. Now, for me, that’s just house style - I use bolds much as a traditional print publication would use italics, to highlight names and titles. The search engines might just think I was trying to spam them. So I’ve taken 50% or so of the DTs out.

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