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.
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.
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.
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.
There is a certain feeling that one can achieve when you are deep into a project. It feels like you have a one track mind, and all productivity is channeling directly into that project. It seems like nothing else is really all that relevant.
I like achieving that state of mind. It means that I’m in the groove and that I’m being productive. It is harder and harder to do that now these days. Why?
Matt Cutts has a good video today in which somebody poses the question “Is there such a thing as building too many links?”
Of course the answer isn’t black and white, but I like this answer. I really just makes sense and it reinforces the ideas behind building sites that have good content. It seems that all roads lead to one nation, the nation of “Quality Content”.
Now, creating buzz around your quality content is a whole different story, but let’s leave it at that for now.
When looking for content for a web site, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of ways to get some bits of text to put on your web pages without writing it all yourself.
In my case, I typically like to write most of the content for my sites, mainly because I’m a stickler for quality. But, I do sometimes break down and take articles submissions from other sources, if the quality is good.
Which brings me to my current rant. Actually, this isn’t so much a rant as much as it is a point of view that hopefully gives article publishers some insight into building quality articles.
Let’s face it, link building sucks. You need to basically get used to being rejected a lot. It’s kinda like cold-call sales at times. You will constantly be contacting people (webmasters) that you normally wouldn’t contact, they won’t be expecting to hear from you, and they more than likely will ignore you or not cater to your request.
