- 29
- Sphinn It!
Posted By: MiriamEllis 388 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchengineguide.com)
Category: Google SEO
18 Comments
18 Comments
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Comments
No. Google hates what *some* people who *claim* to be SEOs do. In those cases, they're mostly not SEOs. They're spammers.
I think Google has no issue with those who optimise their titles and tags, fix canonicalisation issues, clean up and optimise their navigation and site architecture, rewrite their content to talk to the visitor, and so on.
They do have issues with all the stuff they mention not to do in their Webmaster Guidelines. I'll guess they spend a lot of time working out where they are going to be hit next and evolving a plan to deal with it.
That's what I'd be naturally inclined to think, too, g1smd. On the other hand, it's always been at the back of my mind as a designer that the moment I cover all the bases (title tags etc.) it becomes very obvious that the site has been created by someone who knows about SEO best practices. Nearly all of the redesign work I've done is for Mom and Pops who never knew what a title tag is, and their homemade site reflects that. When it's redone, it does reflect that someone read up on SEO somewhere in the picture and is attempting to optimize the pages.
At this point, I don't think it's a problem. But, Google's policies change. At this point, optimized sites do typically outrank messed up sites (not always). But what if that changes? That's kind of what I got out of Jill's post. Maybe Jill will come here and talk more about this :)
Miriam
If SEO is a matter of making improvements to a site for the purposes of clarity and usability, then I don't think there's anything to worry about.
*** Unfortunately, unscrupulous SEOs have given Google good reasons not to like us ***
Maybe it is time we stopped calling such people SEOs? They don't offer SEO services; they offer spamming and cheating services.
I mean to say that here in the UK, we don't call a "fake plumber" a "plumber" we call them a "cowboy" or "rogue trader" or "thief" or "conman" or "con artist" or "cheat", or "wide boy". Likewise with the dodgy builders, and the tinkers offering to "tarmac your drive cheap". They aren't called builders by the masses.
The industry will forever have a bad reputation if it cannot sort out exactly what it is that real SEOs do; and define that people who do something else aren't actually SEOs.
g1smd
"Maybe it is time we stopped calling such people SEOs? They don't offer SEO services; they offer spamming and cheating services."
Well said. I had recently the same argument with Mattt Cutts because he keeps mentioning Blackhat SEO/Whitehat SEO. I said there is no Blackhat/Whitehat SEO, rather there is SEO or Spam.
Matt replied:
"Harith, I’m comfortable with SEO being whitehat/blackhat; I don’t think you’d get many blackhats to say “I don’t do SEO; I do spam!” " :-)
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/#comment-110803
I'm not giving up on Matt. I shall keep "educating" him until he stop using those Blackhat/Whitehat terms :-)
"I said there is no Backhat/Whitehat SEO, rather there is SEO or Spam"
Most SEOs are grey hats - neither completely innocent nor guilty as sin. But colors don't really concern me.
I enjoyed reading this article the first time, so I have Sphunn it any way, because it does actually highlight something.
There isn't a link from the syndicated copy to the original on highrankings.com
With all forms of syndication I try to get links back to my original articles which has been mentioned a number of times by Googlers.
Not doing so might be in itself looked on as "grey", or it might be looked on as a good way of owning a particular search term if all the articles syndicated generate links.
This was already sphunn here:
http://sphinn.com/story.php?id=4148
Jill
As such, we might as well change the title of this thread to:
The Art of Recycling Jill Whalen's Articles :-)
twice as good - sphunn twice
Hi Jill,
Gosh..it didn't tell me that when I sphunn this article of yours. I'm puzzled. I thought that if you attempted to sphinn a news story that had already been sphunn the interface wouldn't let you. Is that not right? I could swear that happened to me once before.
At any rate...I really liked what you wrote!
Miriam
@Miriam - not your fault. The original was here:
http://www.highrankings.com/advisor/art-of-seo
But it was syndicated by S. E. Guide.
Thanks, Tim. I guess I'd better be more aware of syndication from now on. I appreciate you explaining that to me.
Miriam
@Miriam - Again, it's not your fault. In fact, due to the nature of many blog formats it's going to be something that the managers here will need to solve and deal with frequently.
Some stories get submitted 4 or 5 times where several sites have written up the event. It is the nature of things that it happens. Sometimes that is good, because then you get to see several opinions of the original story.
the syndicated articles probably should reference the original, I guess.
Jill, happy to change things up if you'd like. We published this one the same way we've always republished your content (with your express permission I'd note.)
If you'd like us to add an appendage to the end of each article from now on, I'm happy to oblige.
That said, it would be nice if Sphinn could pick up on duplicate content the way sites like Digg do. I realize it's a lot harder to run those types of content searches to find the same content on different domains, but it would be nice.
Jen, no I don't have a problem with the syndication. I agree it is really more of a Sphinn problem. Like splitting PageRank, I just would hate to have my Sphinn's split through dupe submissions! :)