142 - SEO Secrets and Secrets to How Search Engines Work

  Guest Bio: Stephan Spencer is an internationally recognized SEO expert and bestselling author. He is the author of “Google Power Search”, co-author of “Social eCommerce”, and co-author of the “The Art of SEO”, now in its 3rd edition and considered THE bible on SEO. Stephan founded Netconcepts in 1995 and grew it into a multi-national SEO agency before selling it in 2010 to Covario. Stephan continued as a sought-after SEO and digital strategy consultant. His clients post-acquisition have included Zappos, Sony Store, Quicksilver, Best Buy Canada, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Chanel. Stephan speaks at many Internet marketing events, including SES, SMX, PubCon, Internet Retailer, Shop.org, etc. He’s contributed to Huffington Post, Search Engine Land, DM News and MarketingProfs, among others. Stephan is the creator of Traffic Control, a 3-day seminar on SEO, co-creator of the 3-day professional development seminar Passions into Profits with Kris Jones, and the host of 2 podcasts, The Optimized Geek and Marketing Speak. Interesting Facts and Sound Bites:  

• He holds an M.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• Inventor of “The Gravitystream” - an automated pay-for-performance natural search technology platform, re-branded as RIO SEO Website Optimizer.

Show Notes:

Nile:              Hey, welcome back to the social media business hour. We’re talking with Stephan Spencer and Stephan is a true SEO expert. He’s really written the bible on SEO. Go back in the first segment if you’d like and listen to the details regarding that. But without getting into the details we were talking about some SEO strategies and one of the things that we happened to talk about was an SEO audit and in that audit finding duplicate content. Now, one of the questions I get asked a lot Stephan is about duplicate content. What’s considered duplicate content? What’s not? You know, what would get you slapped by Google if you will. And so rather than me speculating on it let me just ask you about that. Stephan:          Yeah, great question. So, let me first dispel a big myth about duplicate content. It doesn’t create a penalty situation. It is a filter. Not a penalty. So, when you get filtered because you have duplicate content that another more authoritative site also has it’s not like you are being slapped. It’s just basically that you’re not being favored over a more authoritative site. And this can happen if you’re even the originator of the content. So, let’s say that you have created unique valuable content about cruises and cruise lines and various, you know, just each cruise line, princess cruises and so forth. And this is an actual real world case. A company, cruises.com created all these different write ups about each cruise and each cruise line and so forth and then they would syndicate it to various sites that -- like airline partners and travel partners like Orbits. And guess who would end up winning the duplicate content filter war in Google. It wasn’t cruises.com. it wasn’t even any of the airlines. It was Orbits. Because when you think about how much authority Orbits has with all of these links and really powerful, important links pointing to their site. So, cruises.orbits.com was the site that would win out and then everything else would get filtered. So, you don’t want to get filtered out. Even if you’re the originator of the content that can happen so there’s some strategies and tactics you can use to ensure that doesn’t happen. Like for example, any partners you’re syndicating to asking them to link back to the -- your original article from their article. Like if you’re syndicating an article to various business sites then you could have in the byline or the bio where you specify, you know, just your company and so forth. You can include a link to the original article on your site. Not just to your home page because we want to link directly to the article in question so that Google can see that oh, this is the originator. And also when you’re the first one to show that article on the web and then later your syndication partners start to show it on their websites that’s also a signal. And then there’s another thing that -- I’ll geek out for just a moment here and then we’ll get back to normal talk. And that’s called a canonical tag. So, you add this into the HTML code. It’s not really difficult to do. It’s just one line of HTML and it just specifies what the definitive source URL of that piece of content is and so if you get permission, you get buy in from this syndicating partner that they’ll put a canonical tag in your HTML on the page that points to your URL, your article on your site then that will be a very definitive signal to Google that you’re the originator of that content.   Nile:                You know, if you happen to share content or get it syndicated and the syndication partner -- obviously, you might want. But they are not going to do anything related to linking back to you or allowing this conical tag. Did I get that right?   Stephan:          Canonical tag.   Nile:                Canonical. See? I told you I’d mispronounce it. What -- or how much of the content do you have to change on your page to make it unique?   Stephan:          Substantial. It would have to be very substantial. Because if you just move your paragraphs around or you add an extra paragraph -- think of it like if you had this imaginary five or six-word long window that you ran across both pages to compare and contrast them and see how many of those -- these are called shingles. These five or six word long windows are in common between the two documents. Shuffling paragraphs around is going to still leave most of those shingles in common between the two documents. Adding an extra paragraph or reducing a paragraph, that’s still going to keep -- leave most of the shingles in common between the two documents. You’d have to do a substantial rewrite. Paraphrase most everything. Or significantly augment the content with tons of like user generated content, lots of customer reviews or discussion forum posts and things like that to really differentiate your content from the other site. And that’s also -- we didn’t even go into the issue of duplicate content that you’re causing to your own site just by misconfiguring all the -- like the URL structure or having superfluous parameters in the URL. And I’m getting geeky again. Sorry. I just -- I’m a geek.   Nile:                That’s okay. Keep getting geeky. You know, we get some technical people on here so we want to know this.   Stephan:          Yeah, yeah. and actually I’m a podcaster as well so -- when I say I’m a geek I actually have a show that has geek in its name. optimized geek.   Nile:                I like it.   Stephan:          So, yeah. I’m a real geek. So, anyways, if you have duplicate content on your own site -- so, you are competing with yourself. Now it’s like you are creating not only duplicate content but you’re creating page rank dilution. So, think of it this way. Like if the leading candidate for president -- whoever that is. I’m not going to get into Trump and all that sort of stuff. But let’s say whoever your favorite candidate is had a twin brother or a sister, whatever. And they both ran and they had similar platforms and they didn’t really have any differentiating, you know, their level of experience was pretty much the same and so forth. You’d have a hard time picking one of them, right? So, it would split the vote and neither would win. So, imagine doing that on your website. You have five different variants of the same exact product page at different URLs. You know, flags or parameters in the URL, tracking parameters and things and they’re all picked up by Google. It’s like having four twin brothers and you both, you know, all of you running for president and none of you are going to win.   Nile:                You know, so people get into article spinners and then they’re looking to change words out in the article and they get the percentage of words and all that type stuff. It sounds like that’s sort of a game that they’re probably not going to win. Is that a fair statement?   Stephan:          Oh, are they not going to win? In fact, they are going to lose very badly because most of Google’s future algorithm is going to be based on machine learning and you can bet that with artificial intelligence they’re going to be able to sniff out any of that nonsense and if it does not read like it was written by a human and it like reads like poetry -- you can't make an article spinner right like Shakespeare or, you know, whatever. Pick your favorite poet or a writer, right. So, you cannot fool the search engines going forward. You might be able to fool them today or a couple of years ago. But even today I’d say you probably aren’t fooling them. Maybe a few years ago possibly. So, you are down a path that is not going to bode well for -- it’s not going to -- you’re not going to win. You are going to in fact lose. Certainly get penalized for it. And when