I’ve been experiencing and interesting effect in my quest to build web sites and work on SEO campaigns. I have started to outsource many of the common, repetitive tasks to help scale out the projects. While this is pretty nice, I’m finding myself a little lost on direction while having so much of the work in the hands of others.
Where I used to spend hours hunting down possible links, or hours developing page copy, I now sit and monitor progress of various people that are doing the work for me.
I’m finding this to be a little boring. But that’s okay because this is also the way I need to operating at this point. I reached near-burnout by trying to do everything myself at one point, even though I felt more “in the trenches”.
I almost need to relish in this new situation and get used to it. I need to focus my time on monitoring sites, making sure I’m getting good quality content and link building help from my workers, and overall looking at the big picture.
I guess it’s not so much being bored, but it’s just getting used to not being so overly busy. Am I working smarter rather than harder? I hope so. I just have to get used to the new pace.
Matt Cutts recently posted a video in which he discusses the importance of having your target keywords in your domain name.
I know that a lot of people find this to be important in the world of SEO, so it’s interesting to hear what Matt has to say.
Some of my thoughts?
I’ve never really been completely convinced that a keyword domain is super-duper-important. Case in point would be my web site about saltwater aquariums.
Aquarist-Refuge.com – that’s the domain name for that web site, but it ranks very well for the keywords “saltwater aquarium” and “saltwater aquariums”. This is not at all because of the domain name. The domain name doesn’t even have the keyword “aquarium” in it.
However, with proper on-site SEO and other efforts, it ranks well for those keywords.
That is why I’m personally not very convinced that a keyword domain is all that important. I do however believe that it holds weight and if you want to use a keyword domain it can help to rank more quickly. It took a certain amount of time and effort to get that site ranked well for “saltwater aquariums”, and I am entirely convinced that if my domain was “saltwateraquariums.com” that I wouldn’t have had to work as hard.
That being said, I do like keyword domains. I seem to be able to get a site to rank with less effort if I can get a domain that has the target keywords in it. However, none of those domain names are terribly inspiring or brandable.
Either way, Matt is basically saying here that Google is looking to put less weight on keyword domains. He doesn’t say they are going to have no weight, he just says they are going to dial it down a bit. Sounds fine to me.
I might not have to worry about finding keyword domains as much as I used to in the past if I wanted to rank well and rank soon for a particular keyword. But that is speculation, only time will tell.
When it comes to duplicate content, it is easy to find many varying opinions. I’ve run across many forum discussions or blog posts about what constitutes duplicate content and whether or not duplicate content will get you penalized.
There are as many opinions as you can possibly imagine, and for the most part everybody is guessing or making educated guesses as to what duplicate content is and how it can affect your site rankings.
What it really comes down to though, in my opinion, is who’s rules do we need to play by?
I don’t like to use duplicate content for anything. I don’t like to take articles already published on other sites and use them on my own sites. I don’t like to take submissions from authors if they are submitting the same content to other web sites.
That’s my stance though.
It doesn’t matter what I think, what matters is who gets to set the rules and who gets to enforce rules.
Right now, I lean towards playing by Google’s rules regarding duplicate content.
Why? Mainly because they are my biggest source of traffic, and I’m trying to get traffic from their playground (their search engine). So, if I’m going to play in their playground, I need to play by their rules.
Also, Google’s duplicate content rules and notes just make sense. They seem to me to be like a “good practice” guide for anybody that is trying to sort out the best ways to use (or the best reasons to avoid) content that is published elsewhere on the web.
A few things that I like about Google duplicate content policies:
- They recommend the best ways to handle url variations and robots/spidering to make sure that there is no confusion for the bots on your web site.
- They outline the fact that content that is even partially duplicated can still be identified by their system as duplicate.
- They make Webmaster Tools available to help us help their spiders, which is very nice of them.
For these reasons, I tend to avoid the following when placing content on my sites:
- I don’t like to use snippets of text from other sites unless it’s a direct, relevant quote, and I link to the source.
- I prefer to write all content from scratch or have somebody write it from scratch. That way I avoid publishing something to my site that is already published on another site, word for word.
- I like to use plugins for WordPress (the main site platform that I use) to help robots better sort out the content on my pages and to help them steer clear of author or tag pages that may show content that is already elsewhere on my sites.
I mentioned that I use WordPress. WordPress is a blogging platform. And out of the box, it shows the latest posts on the home page. So, in many cases you could say that the home page of a WordPress blog is just showing duplicate content from other pages on your site. Google hints that this may be a bad idea, but I don’t think it really matters all that much, mainly because so many sites use that type of format. Many valuable, informative sites.
So even though Google mentions that as a possible negative (showing content on the home page that exists elsewhere in the site), I don’t think it really is anything to worry about.
Anyways, I’m done rambling now. If you are worried about using or handling duplicate content on your web sites, I would suggest reading through Google’s guidelines on this matter and form your own opinion. Don’t form an opinion before you understand how they look at this matter.
Posted in Rants on 28. Feb, 2011
I’ve always been a fairly sparse user of Facebook. I mainly like to keep my account running to keep in touch with a few specific people, even though I’ve “befriended” many.
When I first signed up for and started using Facebook, I was about 10 years removed from high school, so naturally the first friend flux was a bunch of people that I hadn’t heard from for about 10 years, since high school.
Then the coworkers also became friends. Then many family members started using it.
I got used to watching the daily life streams of people that I didn’t really think I’d ever be in contact with again in my lifetime. It’s weird stuff. There’s nothing more interesting or disturbing than following the daily drama of somebody you have not talked to or seen for several years since high school.
Now, these days, the daily dramatics from people of past times has given way to a much more commercialized stream of information. I’ve started to “like” many business for many reasons, and now whenever I log into Facebook I’m basically seeing a feed that consists of the following:
- Some people that I haven’t known for a long time posting pictures of their babies that I’ll never see.
- Some people that I haven’t known for a long time bitching about daily life.
- Lot’s of new blog posts and new article announcements from many online publications.
- Lot’s of commercial and promotional stuff from local businesses.
Logging into Facebook is kinda like going to a high school reunion sponsored by all the businesses that have enticed me to “like” them on Facebook.
These days when I log in, it’s becoming more and more overrun by businesses and people with commercial intent, it doesn’t seem so much to be the friendly gathering ground that it used to be.
The more that I think about this, I should start focusing on the people or organizations that I really do want to hear from. If I did this, I would:
- Only be be friends on Facebook with people I currently know or socialize with, and family members.
- Only follow the Minnesota Twins and bands that I like to keep up on.
Yeah, I might do that.
I recently have been using 1Password to keep all my passwords organized. For the most part, it’s helping me to be a lot more efficient during my work, due to the fact that it makes keeping track of multiple passwords a lot more easy. I use this app with Firefox and Dropbox to make my life easy.
There is one thing that I really like about 1Password, and there is one thing that I really do not like, and the rest of my opinions seem to sit somewhere in the middle.
What are these two things I’m referring to?
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I recently just wrote an entry about why it’s not a good idea to get bogged down with checking web stats every day. This new entry is going against those thoughts. But it’s for a good reason.
I do have one reason that I sometimes like to look at my web traffic stats every day.
I like to look at the keywords the people are using to find my site. They often contain phrases that are questions. Answering these questions makes for great content ideas for the sites.
Let’s say I am looking at the list of phrases that people types yesterday to find one of my sites, and I see the question “how to clean aquarium glass”, sitting there nicely as a keyword phrase.
Great, I just have a new content idea for the day. I can write a post that helps people learn how to clean aquarium glass, and it’s probably related to a lot of the other content on the site since somebody found the site using that key phrase.
Using this technique, I can usually weed out ideas that go into more depth or get more specific than some of the general topics that are already on a site. This is a good thing.
That’s about the only reason I can think of at the moment to take the time to look at web traffic stats each day, the right stats and info can make content idea generation pretty snappy.
Productivity is a big issue for busy webmasters. How can we stay focused on what is really worth working on (expanding our web presences) and not get bogged down by what I consider to be the fun stuff?
I call stat checking and analysis fun, because it is. Doing so allows you to see information that shows you how well your efforts are (or aren’t) working.
Do you log into Google Analytics every day? Do you spend a good chunk of time each day looking at various accounts and reports to see how your sites are positioned in the SERPs and how much traffic you are getting?
You might be spending too much time doing that, if that is the case.
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I have to admit, when I first saw the announcement when I logged into my Linkvana account the other day, I thought “hmm… something more to spend money on, is it even worth it?”
Linkvana isn’t really that cheap to start with (see my recent Linkvana review for more details), so the fact that they are adding services that require you to spend more money to take advantage of them can be kind of insulting.
But, I took a deeper look at the blog commenting service details and I think it might be worth a trial run, just to see what type of impact it makes on one of my projects.
Read on to learn more about the details of this blog commenting service.
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