Sphinn - SEO Linking Gotchas Even The Pros Make

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Sphinn It!

Went Hot: November 27, 2007 - 7:06 pm
Posted By: AndyBeard 586 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://andybeard.eu)
Category: SEO

Have you made these mistakes?

6 Comments

Who Desphunn This (0)

Comments

from MattMcGee 585 days ago #

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That's one of the best things you've written, Andy, and I agree with you about the various nuggets in the Eric/Matt interview.

from sza 585 days ago #

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For me, the essence of the whole article was the following:

If you have a page that has no outgoing links, or those outgoing links are made invisible to the bot through some combination of robots.txt and meta tags. then you are not using its potential to pass its PR on to other pages of yours, and that's a waste.

Well, this should be quite self-evident.

Or did I miss something?

from AndyBeard 585 days ago #

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sza most SEO posts for blogs and blogging suggest in some way to use robots.txt or meta noindex follow without even mentioning external links on duplicate content pages, or creating dangling pages when you block them from being indexed.

I am not just referring to meta bloggers, but also people who present panels at search conferences.

The interview with Matt is one of the most important articles that has appeared in recent times for clearing things up, and fortunately received a lot of Sphinns, but I am not sure if enough people actually read it multiple times, and then applied that knowledge to what they were doing on their sites.

I also don't think the different ways Google might handle dangling pages has been explored in great depth.

Google does understand blog structure, or so Matt has suggested in the past, and it is quite interesting to see how they assign toolbar pagerank to various pages that are looked on as duplicate content immediately after an update.
Google do seem to identify duplicate content pages fairly well on Wordpress, and such pages might not be a juice sink.

I don't believe it is self evident, or that we have enough information to calculate the true effect.

from sza 585 days ago #

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OK. So the issue is people trying to hide duplicate content (for well-known reasons) but not realizing that they still pour PR into those pages like into black holes. Am I close now? :-)

from tappingcreativity 585 days ago #

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Very well explained, in both the article and comment follow up.

from AndyBeard 585 days ago #

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sza it is impossible to say whether it is pouring or just a trickle, because how Google treat the dangling pages is in my opinion not clearly explained, which is why I included an alternative interpretation which is also as I clearly stated not based on fact.

On many blog setups the mini black holes actually outnumber the real links if they use some of the recommended robots.txt files out there. There are a few plugins which partially deal with some of this, but most of the current crop of all-in-one SEO plugins give too much of a false sense of security.

With so many different blog configurations and themes, the hard part is deciding what to do, and blocking off duplicate content is blocking off internal linkage, which offsets external links a significant amount, as long as the duplicate content pages don't in themselves duplicate all the external links.