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Duplicate web pages.

It does no good whatever for a user to click through a search result

only to find that your web pages have been shared with everyone else. These duplicate pages

gum up the works and reduce the level at which your pages end up in the search results.

Content that has been scraped from numerous other sites.

Content scraping is the

practice of pulling content from other web sites and repackaging it so that it looks like

your own content. Although scraped content may look different from the original, it is

still duplicate content, and many search engines will leave you completely out of the

search index and the search results.

Hidden pages

One last SEO issue concerns the damage to your SEO strategy that hidden pages can inflict. These

are pages in your web site that are visible only to a search crawler. Hidden pages can also lead to

issues like hidden keywords and hidden links. Keywords and links help to boost your search rank-

ings, so many people try to capitalize on these requirements by hiding them within the body of a

web page, sometimes in a font color that perfectly matches the site background.

There’s no way around the issue of hidden pages. If you have a web site and it contains hidden pages,

it’s just a matter of time before the crawler figures out that the content is part of a hidden SEO strat-

egy. Once that’s determined by the crawler, your site ranking will drop drastically.

After Your Site Is Built

Building the right site to help maximize your SEO efforts is a difficult task. And when you’re finished,

the work doesn’t end. SEO is an ongoing strategy, not a technology that you can implement and for-

get. Time needs to be spent reviewing your practices, examining results, and making adjustments

where necessary. If this ongoing maintenance is ignored, your SEO efforts to this point will quickly

become time that would have been better spent standing out on the street with a sign around your

neck advertising your web site. That might be more effective than outdated SEO.

Beware of content thieves

Maintenance of your SEO strategies is also essential in helping you find problems that might be com-

pletely unrelated to SEO. For example, SEO strategies can help you locate content thieves. One such

strategy is tagging your web site. Some people (including black-hat SEOs) take snippets of content

from your site to use on their own. If you tag your content properly, you can use some very distinc-

tive tags, which will help you quickly locate content that has been stolen.

Another way in which SEO helps you to locate stolen content is through tracking. Presumably, if

you’re executing SEO strategies, you’re monitoring your site metrics with a program like Google

Analytics. Watching the metrics used by one of those analytics programs can help you locate con-

tent thieves. For example, if you look at your incoming links on one of these programs, you might

find that people are coming to your site from a completely unexpected location. If that’s the case,

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SEO Strategies

Part II

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