Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

Keyword Cannibalisation is the term used for the common SEO mistake of having several of your website’s pages targeting the same keyword.  This confuses the search engines as to which page to serve back to users.  This also confuses other sites owners that want to link to your site thereby leading different sites to link to different pages leading to a dilution of your link popularity.

So what are the most common causes of keyword cannibalisation?

1. Duplicate Title and Meta Tags

2. Duplicate Content

3. Similar internal links pointing to different pages.

How do you solve Keyword Cannibalisation?  Easy,  make sure each of your pages are targeting different keywords by optimising the meta tags and ensuring unique content on each page.  Also ensure that all internal links on your website support the landing pages’ keyword target.

There are various tools available to help you solve Keyword Cannibalisation including:

1. Conducting a site colon search ie type site:yoursite.com in Google;  You can tell by browsing the results if you’re suffering from Keyword Cannibalization.

2. Performing permanent redirects (301) to ensure that many pages with similar content are all merged into one.

3. Using content similarity tools to check duplicate content, a good tool of this sort can be found here: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

To sum up, make sure that your website’s pages are not cannibalised by following the simple steps mentioned above.  Good luck!

A good article was published by Brett Borders on his Copy Brighter blog listing 7 SEO techniques that no longer work.  here’s the summary with links to related posts on this blog:

• Reciprocal links. Read: A Reciprocal Link Building Strategy that Works

• The “site: *** -sljktf” command (to show the supplemental index results). Read: Google’s Supplemental Results

• Directory links.  Read: Directories - how to submit to them

• Open link brokers and link networks. Read: Purchasing Links - A Best Practice Guide

• Sponsored blog post networks. Read: The Perfect Inbound Link

• Owning the SERPs with subdomains.  Read: Subdomain - A best Practice Guide

• 10 Blue Links. Read: Google’s Universal Search Extends to Blogs and SEO for Universal Search

Thanks for your article Brett, very thorough!

Matt Cutts from Google answers questions and addresses myths such as sites on the same server, IP, and including off-domain JavaScript.

Enjoy…

Google Direkt

I was asked to look at a website today that had suddenly dropped in Google’s search results.  Now when I say dropped, I mean DROPPED… from page 1 to page 950!  

My first though was they’ve been penalised by Google with the dreaded 950 penalty, that’s the penalty used for sites who’re penalised for obtaining paid links for SEO purposes (950 refers to the last page of the Google results pages).

My first SEO instinct was to check the backlinks of the said website and to see where it had obtained these links and to also check the anchor text used for these links.  My suspicions were confirmed.  It seems that the site had agreed with an owner of a blog network to purchase links using highly competitive keywords as anchor text,   Google found out and penalised the site using the 950 penalty.

My advise to the site owner… remove the links and wait a week or two till Google realises that the links have been removed, most likely, the 950 penalty will then be removed by Google.

I’ll let you know what happens, stay tuned…

Network Solutions’ Snr VP Stephanie Leffler talks about how companies can ensure that their Web sites come out at the top of the search engines. 

Enjoy… 

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