A Sneaky Little Panda
In last week’s post I mentioned that it felt like there had been a Panda update as well as a Penguin one. From the data we are looking at it, it looks like Panda hit Australia last Sunday the 19th. We have several clients that experienced really good jumps across the board with rankings pre the Penguin roll out on Tuesday afternoon. One client had 9 phrases go to no.1 in a day which I haven’t seen in a long time.
Conversely we had one client that got hit quite hard and their backlink profile was ok. We had disavowed several months earlier and got rid of what spammy backlinks we could find. What we did find with the client that had dropped was that they had a lot of duplicated content external to their own site. We are now in the process of eliminating that.
Duplication & SEO
Google has previously said that you won’t get penalised for duplicate content unless you are doing it to be spammy. Why complicate things though? For instance why let Google crawl all of your blog tags to find the same content at a different address? It serves no purpose and simply complicates matters. So like the Bigcommerce SEO video I did, you could have an intellectual discussion about whether or not a certain practice is hurting your ranking chances or you could just eliminate it from the conversation. Time and time again when we fix duplication we get a good bump in rankings. Last week was pretty extraordinary.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
