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I figured highlighting some goodies from site reviews is always handy. So here are some snippets of interest from Matts Blog about the recent PubCon get together
The promotional gifts company had a couple issues. For one thing, I was immediately able to find 20+ other sites also belonged to the promotional gifts person. The other sites offered overlapping content and overlapping pages on different urls. The larger issue was searching for a few words from a description quickly found dozens of other sites with the exact same descriptions. We discussed the difficulty of adding value to feeds when youre running lots of sites. One thing to do is to find ways to incorporate user feedback (forums, reviews, etc.). The wrong thing to do is to try to add a few extra sentences or to scramble a few words or bullet points trying to avoid duplicate content detection. If I can spot duplicate content in a minute with a search, Google has time to do more in-depth duplicate detection in its index.
And theres more
My favorite for the real estate licensing site is that in less that a minute, I was able to find 50+ other domains that this person hadeverything from learning Spanish to military training. So I got to say Let us be frank, you and I: how many sites do you have? He paused for a while, then said a handful. After I ran through several of his sites, he agree that he had quite a few. My quick take is that if youre running 50 or a 100 domains yourself, youre fundamentally different than the chiropractor with his one site: with that many domains, each domain doesnt always get as much loving attention, and that can really show. Ask yourself how many domains you have, and if its so many that lots of domains end up a bit cookie-cutter-like.
Several times during the session, it was readily apparent that someone had tried to do reciprocal links as a quick hit to increase their link popularity. When I saw that in the backlinks, I tried to communicate that 1) it was immediately obvious to me, and therefore our algorithms can do a pretty good job of spotting excessive reciprocal links, and 2) in the instances that I looked at, the reciprocal links werent doing any good. I urged folks to spend more time looking for ways to make a compelling site that attract viral buzz or word of mouth. Compelling sites that are well-marketed attract editorially chosen links, which tend to help a site more.
"The peripheral site had urls that were like /i-Linksys-WRT54G-Wireless-G-54Mbps-Broadband-Router-4-Port-10100Mbps-Switch-54Mbps-80211G-Access-Point-519 , which looks kinda cruddy. Instead of using the first 14-15 words of the description, the panel recommended truncating the keywords in the url to ~4-5 words. The site also had session ID stuff like sid=te8is439m75w6mp that I recommended to drop if they could. The site also had product categories, but the urls were like /s-subcat-NETWORK~.html. Personally, I think having /network/ and then having the networking products in that subdirectory is a little cleaner."
"The HiFi store was fine, but this was another example where someone had 40+ other sites. Having lots of sites isnt bad, but Ive mentioned the risk that not all the sites get as much attention as they should. In this case, 1-2 of the sites were stuff like cheap-cheap-(something-related-to-telephone-calling).com. Rather than any real content, most of the pages were pay-per-click (PPC) parked pages, and when I checked the whois on them, they all had whois privacy protection service on them. Thats relatively unusual. Having lots of sites isnt automatically bad, and having PPC sites isnt automatically bad, and having whois privacy turned on isnt automatically bad, but once you get several of these factors all together, youre often talking about a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who just has a single site or so."
From Matt Cutts Blog
What to take from it? Well, I leave that to you for now.. I shall try and come back to comment on this further soon
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