Continuing on my series on SES 2008 San Jose, this White paper is again a hybrid of what was shared and what I have learnt over a decade on search engines.

If I give you 10 pages to read, you would scan through, start reading and if what you are reading is “new to you”  may be you would read all ten of them at one go.

Bingo.

Now, if I give you 10 pages to read and when you scan through you find that “you’ve read it before” or “only one page is unique”, you may not even read my one unique page and trash all, worse, you would remember me as guy who tricked you by giving 10 pages to read when he had just information for one page. You would make a note  “not so nice man to know.”

To me this is content duplication and so it is to search engines, so here we go.

1. Search engines job is to satisfy the searcher, they want to grow and be seen as credible.
2. Search engines have no favorites.
3. They trust you unless you betray them, they work with a basic premise that what you are feeding them is your own and unique.
4. So when you feed search engines anything they “Scan”, if you are “New”  they may read whole of it.
5. If you are not “New” they’ll trash you and “remember” you as “not a good site to know”.

So what are your choices, simple choice is to always provide “New content”, but this choice is expensive and restrictive to many, so what do these many do:

1. Put same content on many pages on the same site as it is.
2. Put same content on many pages of the same site with minor modifications, disguising it as new content.
3. Put same content on many different sites under the same ownership.
4. Put same content on many different sites with minor modifications but the sites are under the same ownership.
5. Put same content on many different sites under many different ownerships, in many different servers, in many different data centers with or without minor modifications.

They all presume that they would be able to manipulate their way around, some do succeed, but issue is how hard are you working to do something which is wrong anyway. Search engines are becoming smarter by every passing day, they are scanning better, they are storing better and they are recalling better. The best case scenario is don’t duplicate your content and don’t manipulate content of others and put the same on your site, remember sooner or later you would be caught and become “Not a Good Site to Know”, and search engines would drop you out, as we all do.

This leaves us with the issue of what if someone does this to me. Yes, this is the issue!

So if you are original source of the content, your worry is – How does search engine know that I am the original? Search engines are working very hard to reach the original, in case they don;t make them aware.

Do what you will do with your assets: Protect them, be vigilant and act if someone breaches your copyrights. A related issue is when you syndicate your original content, I will cover this subsequently.

Some common inadvertent content duplication mistakes and issues:

1. When spiders read your content four times:  http://example.com,  http://www.example.com, http://www.example.com/index.html or http://example.com/index.html. Most of the spiders know how to circumvent it, but it will help to put 301 re-directions in place and route everything to www.example.com
2. When you change platform
3. When you change URL structures, remove the old one and  deploy 301 redirects
4. When you create test folders, remove your test folders
5. When you shift to a sub domain, clear the content permanently from your servers
6. Disclaimers and privacy policies running across sites and copyright statements running across site. put non-crawlable JS functions or connect them centrally.
7. Check your landing pages, if you have multiple landing pages make them unique
8. Check your meta titles, and meta descriptions, they need to be unique
9. Be careful on mirrored sites
10. Content in multiple languages with common attributes or language strings is a no no
11. Use exclude protocol in robots.txt where-ever you need to share the same content, within the same site or at different domains
12. Check out and remove any hidden link.
13. Use password protection where you need to carry duplicate content
14. Permanent deletion of duplicate content is better than redirection

The above can form some of the best practices SEO’s can follow.

more to come…

—– Original Message —–

From: Ashu Dutt

To: deleted by Simar to avoid further spam back to me

Cc: purnima.oswal@ticketcounterindia.com

Sent: 2008-08-22 03:29

Subject:FROM: ASHU DUTT, TICKETCOUNTER – YOUR MAIL

Dear Simar:

 

Your name is with us. It is possible it was shared in a meeting/conference etc. Please note that every name and email ID is from our internal database

 

In any case, my aplogies for any inconvenience this may have caused you and we will be glad to “Unsubscribe” you immediately. In any case, all it takes is a simple “Unsubscribe” and we remove the person’s emails address

 

Could you PLEASE SPECIFY the EXACT EMAIL ADDRESS you are getting the mails in since we cannot find xxxxxxx in our mailing list. Obviously, it is getting redirected through some other email address (perhaps one you used previously)

 

Please send me an email address on which you received the mail and we will be glad to UNSUBSCRIBE immediately

 

Warm Regards

Ashu Dutt

 

TICKETCOUNTER
India Office
R-501, Remi Bizcourt
Shah Industrial Estate
Andheri (West)
Mumbai 400 053, India

Tel: +91-22-6675-6612
Fax: +91-22-6675-6249
Email: ashu.dutt@ticketcounterindia.com

 

www.ticketcounterindia.com

—– Original Message —–

From: Purnima Oswal

To: ashu.dutt@ticketcounterindia.com

Sent: Friday, August 22, 2008 12:52 PM

Subject:FW: PURNIMA OSWAL – TICKETCOUNTER REVIEW FOR BACHNA AE HASEENO

        

From: xxxxxx 

Sent:Friday, August 22, 2008 8:35 AM
To:Purnima Oswal
Subject:Re: PURNIMA OSWAL – TICKETCOUNTER REVIEW FOR BACHNA AE HASEENO
Importance: High

 

Please explain from where you got my mail ID, any failure to do so would mean that I proceed against you and your company for spamming and move to get your site banned.

 

Simar

—– Original Message —–

From: Purnima Oswal

To: Purnima Oswal

Sent: 2008-08-22 01:11

Subject:FROM: PURNIMA OSWAL – TICKETCOUNTER REVIEW FOR BACHNA AE HASEENO

 

Enclosed please find the Ticket Counter Review for BACHNA AE HASEENO

 

Reviews for other movies are available at www.ticketcounterindia.com

 

 

Regards

 

Purnima Oswal

 

 

TICKET COUNTER INDIA

 

Shah Industrial Estate

Off Veera Desai Road

Andheri (W)

Mumbai – 400053, India

 

Tel: +91-22-65984129

Fax: +91-22-66756249 

Email:purnima.oswal@ticketcounterindia.com

 

http://www.ticketcounterindia.com

Karishma Thapliyal is the new email spammer on the Internet. She sent over to me three mails in less than one hour. She promptly picked up the phone when I called in for clarification. She denied having any role to play and said her top management is responsible for it. Ms. Thapliyal promissed to get a call back done and ensure that the spam would stop. She just didn’t care to honour her promises.

I am not exactly someone who would be dear to an email spammer.

“

“

http://www.youmint.com/network-Ashish777777

- Ashish Goel”

It comes with a noreply@youmint.com address. What did Youmint.com gain by encouraging email spamming like this, and what did Mr. Ashish Goel get by becoming a hardcore spammer disturbing peace and adding to email overload. At-least they lost me as a supporter to their concept and created a bad mouth. I have seen many sites indulge in unethical practices like this and have always thought of creating a post or a blog to take care of them. I was never troubled enough to get into it seriously, but You Mint and Ashish Goel have succeeded in ensuring that. 

The promoters of You Mint should be aware that gentleman  like Ashish Goel can get them into serious trouble, Unsolicited mails are not done, and that also on all possible IDs you could be using. I am of course contemplating writing to you Mint to hand me over personal details of Mr. Ashish Goel to me, so that joint action against them and Mr. Goel can be initiated. I am sure You Mint is too busy minting money to bother about problems they are creating for others.

If there are others who are suffering from this aggressive Youmint.com supported and promoted spamming please feel free to post your views.