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.
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.
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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I’ve recently begun a new method in regards to how I approach my days. I have done this to keep myself more focused an on task for each area of business that I have to deal with daily.
What I like to do now includes printing a physical sheet of paper (oh no!). This is something that I’ve tried to avoid, printing anything on paper really, but it works out good for me in this instance.
What am I doing differently now?
I use a daily checklist.
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This is something that I have to remind myself about, quite often.
Exposure on the Web can be a race at times. It’s a race to get content online. It’s a race to get search engines to index and rank your content well. It’s a race to convert visitors into buyers. I could go on and on.
Within all these individual races that we participate in, with our Web properties, we need to think more like the Tortoise and less like the Hare.
Why?
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One thing that I’ve noticed recently when looking at search ranking positioning reports is that the positioning of the sites I manage on both Yahoo & Bing is starting to look very similar. It’s not exactly identical yet, but it’s getting close.
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I am now, officially, a huge fan of Linkvana.
I’ve given it about a 3 month trial run (well not technically a trial, since I’ve been paying for it), and I’m very happy with the results I’m getting.
I’m getting better results than I thought I would at first. But I had to go through some ups and downs before reaching this point.
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