The idea of duplicate content scares people

Webmasters seem particularly worried about what will happen if they have duplicate content on their websites. They seem to think it will result in an instant and damaging penalty. But in reality, Google tends to be very forgiving of duplicate content.

Testing shows that duplicate content won’t necessarily rank well, but it doesn’t affect the ability of your website to rank. You won’t be penalized for it, you just not might rank. This is especially true if there are better linked domains publishing the same content as you.

In reality, a lot of the web consists of duplicate content, for nefarious reasons as well as legitimate ones. If you’re really worried that duplicate content is bringing you down, you can always use the noindex meta tag to tell the search engines to drop the pages.

Hot-selling products tend to always maintain a high paying CPM. It’s not hard to understand why. People are searching to buy something that makes a decent profit for the seller. Therefore you can expect that they’re willing to pay a premium for the visitor. If you can consistently find traffic like this, you’re on your way to an upswing in CPM.

Certain times of the year, like right now, you can expect even more shoppers online. If you make landing pages that help these buyers find the products you’re looking for, expect a decent November and December. Just look for hot-selling products that you have an interest in and building websites/pages about them.

It’s as simple as that!

Since Google is free to do whatever they want, there’s no point in working yourself into a frenzy if they make changes which affect you. You’re better off analyzing what happened, and doing your best to stay in the game.

Google will always be this way. The company has such a huge market cap that they probably plan on invading every market they can, so to think of them as a partner is not something I feel is worthwhile. It’s better to keep a wary eye on them, and go with the flow.

Lots of people saw their visible toolbar PR get reduced in the recent Google update. Some people are upset. The rest of us will just muddle on, regardless of what that imaginary metric says about the “quality” of a website.

When you think of the how far the internet has come in the last 10 years it’s amazing. This is true both in terms of functionality and the level of professionalism of many websites. So you can honestly say that most of the information that is new tends to be at least as good, if not better, than the documents that are still existing without update from 10 years ago. But Google loves the old pages.

We’ll see what happens as Google continues to grow and evolve and take more and more factors in affect. I’m sure the bias towards older documents will probably continue, but maybe it won’t be to such a pronounced degree.

The advantages of tweaking are obvious: you can get more money for no extra effort. If you can increase CTR and CPM without having to add content, your life just got that much easier. I’ve tweaked my ads for three months running now and have managed to get an increase each time.

So I’m convinced you must never be satisfied with your efforts. You can almost always squeeze more out of your configuration. When you get complacent, that’s when you stop growing revenues.

I’ll be looking at even more changes this week, just to follow my own advice.

Make sure the content you add is on-topic, and relevant. That’s the job in a nutshell. If you add ancillary search terms that you don’t have pages for, you can expect pretty straightforward results.

Don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Make sure you do your best to add meaningful content, because content that is too thin won’t help much, either. But don’t be afraid to be concise, in any event.

Not all web content will be super long and detailed. The main key is that you provide enough information to satisfy your visitors and to pique their interest to return. And always add consistently to have consistent results.

For entertainment purposes, I can’t see anything wrong with Google Data Center Watching, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a good use of time. You may be able to learn something, but more often than not, the changes seem to come and then go again, without spreading to the data centers that are actually serving queries.

I’m thinking that this one more past-time that will probably sink into the murky past soon enough. But I guess I could be wrong.

Do you like watching DCs?

One advantage for you when they do this is, you can always make more money in a day. If you can get rankings for new subjects today, then you should never give up or accept lowly earnings. All you have to do is keep updating, and some of this traffic is bound to click on ads, making you even better money.

Google has a lot of faults these days, but slowness does not appear to be one of them.

In the past, you would have had to just try and guess what went wrong. All the while you would probably be in a bad emotional state because your traffic and revenue plummeted. Now you can get a decent idea quickly of what needs to be fixed.

This will end up saving webmasters a lot of grief. So even if Google doesn’t like to communicate with webmasters on a personal basis, they can still offer clues to improving indexing. So the next time you notice a plummet in rankings or something equally disturbing, just log in to Webmaster Central and pay attention to any warnings or errors you have. You may just solve your problem quickly.

Otherwise you can do it the old fashioned way: that’s by scanning on your own for any opportunity you can find. But that will take awhile, and is the opposite of automated. And in the end, you have to try and automate every task you can, for the very effectiveness of your work online. If you don’t, you’ll be road kill on the Information Superhighway.

I am open to any other ideas people have for finding info. What methods do you use?