Dec
14
Google duplicate content penalty for identical page titles and meta descriptions?
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There’s been a lot of concern over this for quite a while, with the recommendation being that each page on a site should have a unique page title and meta description that relevant to that particular page. However, with what happens when they’re identical, I don’t think I’d call it a penalty, but a filter in operation.
Other than one (sometimes two slip through), when doing a site: search they’ll get filtered with what I call the “similarity filter” so you’ll see one (occasionally two) but have to click on that link they provide to see additional pages that have been excluded because they’ve been omitted for being very similar to the one shown.
I tested this on a site this summer, with pretty fast results. The web designer had run identical page titles and meta tags throughout the site, and put in a drop-down navigation list at the page top that was parsed as plain text, plus a “byline slogan” also across the entire site on the top of pages.
One page by one page, I removed the drop-down list, replaced the “motto” text with a graphic, and gave each page a unique page title and meta description.
One by one, as this was done to pages, they popped out from behind that “similar pages” link and showed up with a site: search.
It was a short term gig to fix a serious indexing issue that needed a difficult mod_rewrite solution, that was fixed, and just a few site pages were worked on by me, so there are still plenty of pages on that site that still have that similarity problem and did not, do not, and will not rank for the search terms relevant to the still_unfixed pages.
That’s all you can do is tell people what they need to do, but it’s up to them to actually do it. Way too cliche, but you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
I’ve got a page up with a list of links to white papers and patents on duplicate content. One of these days I’ll go through them and condense down and write up what seem to be the more important parts.
Jun
10
Google Search: site: vs. SITE: searches
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There’s a thread in the Google Search Forum that is featured on the homepage of WebmasterWorld noticing that there’s a difference between using the site: operator in upper or lower case.
The difference between the two is that lower case indicates a special operator for Google search, and upper case indicates the query mode, i.e.
FINDALL is equivalent to term1 AND term2 and is the usual search default. The engine retrieves documents that contain both terms, not necessarily in exact proximity or order.
OR means that the engine will retrieve documents that contain either of the terms, as in term1 OR term2, not necessarily both terms.
Using quotes for “term1 term2″ indicates using EXACT MATCH, meaning documents will be retrieved that contain both term1 and term2 in that exact order.
Again, many thanks to Dr. Edel Garcia for his kindness and dedication in pursuing his mission to dispel SEO myths and confusion and educate webmasters on how search works. Here is one of his many references that explain search query modes.
Jun
3
All your blogs are belong to Google
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A recent patent application was filed and posted about at WebmasterWorld: Ranking Blog Documents that went by without much notice. So now that, Google has acquired Feedburner the pieces start to fit together a little more.
Dec
19
What if Google Bought ODP?
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It looks like DMOZ had a near-death experience this week, according to this discussion at ABestWeb: DMOZ is DEAD
It didn’t take long to resuscitate, and it seems the editor notes are completely gone, with an interesting observation made
For those “more creative” webmasters, losing the DMOZ editor notes is like the police losing your criminal record!
I’ve long thought that it would be a good idea if Google bought ODP, but for other reasons, not the least of which are technical issues, but this brings a whole new dimension of possibility.
What if Google did own ODP and had complete access to all the IP numbers of editors and submitters and who knows what else. Bet it would make a fun toy for the spam team. 
By far, this isn’t a new discussion about the demise and value of ODP - nor is it a new idea. From back in 2003:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum17/1726-2-30.htm#msg488698
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum17/1726-3-30.htm
My personal opinion, FWIW, hasn’t changed, not even one little bit.