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The funny thing about duplicate content is that you don't really have to have it for it to appear as if you do have it. But whether you have duplicate content on your site or not, to the search engines appearances are everything . The engines are pretty much just mindless bots that can't reason. They only see what is, or appears to be there and then do what the programmers have determined through the algorithm. How you set up your internal linking structure plays a significant role in whether you set yourself up to appear if you have duplicate content on your site or not. Some things we do without thinking, setting ourselves up for problems ahead. With a little foresight and planning, you can prevent duplicate content issues that are a result of poor internal link development. For example, we know that when we link to site.com/page1.html in one place but then link to www.site.com/page1.html in another, that we are really linking to the same page. But to the search engines, the www. can make a difference. They'll often look at those two links as links to two separate pages. And then analyze each page as if it is a duplicate of the other. But there is something we can do with our internal linking to alleviate this kind of appearance of duplicate content. Link to the www. version only Tomorrow I'll provide information on how to set up your site so when someone types in yoursite.com they are automatically redirected to www.yoursite.com. It's a great permanent fix, but as a safety measure, I also recommend simply adjusting all your links internally to do the same. Example of not linking to www. version. In the image above you can see that the domain contains the www., but when you mouse over any of the navigation links, they point to pages without the www. Even if you have a permanent redirect in place, all the links on your site should point to the proper place. At the very least you're making the search engines and visitors NOT have to redirect. At best, should y

The value of "long-form journalism" has been tested on websites such as Salon and shown to be quite viable. It also attracts a better caliber of writer. With this in mind, over a year ago I was working with an online magazine that was already publishing longer, in-depth articles, in the area of many thousands of words. The SEO challenge we had was that page 2 and beyond for most articles were not getting any search traffic - even though there was plenty of awesome content there. The approach we decided on is labor intensive for the content creators. But after some education, the writers were all interested in trying to increase the audience size. Here are the steps we took: Page 1 naturally enough uses the overall title of the article for both its title tag and header, and has a unique meta-description. Every internal page then has its own unique title and header tag . These are based on the first SUB-head for that section of the article. This means more keyword research and writing of subheads than would normally be the case. If the article is considered as a whole, then an tag would seem more accurate semantically. But Google looks at the semantic structure one URL at a time, not for the overall multi-URL article. Most pages also include internal subheads, and these are style as On each internal page, there is also a "pre-head" that does use the article title from page 1 in a small font. This pre-head does not use a header tag of any kind, just a CSS style. This pre-head article title is at the top as a navigation cue for the user. An additional navigation cue is that the unique page titles each begin with the numeral "2." or "3." Each internal page also has a unique meta description, one that summarizes that page specifically, rather than summarizing the overall article. Every page of the article links to every other page at the top and the bottom. None of this anemic "Back | Next" junk. There's a complete page choice shown on everywhe

After 12 long months of brainstorming, testing, developing, and analyzing, the wait is finally over. Today, I'm ecstatic to announce some very big developments here at SEOmoz. They include: * An Index of the World Wide Web - 30 billion pages (and growing!), refreshed monthly, built to help SEOs and businesses acquire greater intelligence about the Internet's vast landscape * Linkscape - a tool enabling online access to the link data provided by our web index, including ordered, searchable lists of links for sites & pages, and metrics to help judge their value. * A Fresh Design - that gives SEOmoz a more usable, enjoyable, and consistent browsing experience * New Features for PRO Membership - including more membership options, credits to run advanced Linkscape reports (for all PRO members), and more. Since there's an incredible amount of material, I'll do my best to explain things clearly and concisely, covering each of the big changes. If you're feeling more visual, you can also check out our Linkscape comic, which introduces the web index and tool in a more humorous fashion: Check out the Linkscape Comic SEOmoz's Index of the Web For too long, data that is essential to the practice of search engine optimization has been inaccessible to all but a handful of search engineers. The connections between pages (links) and the relationship between links, URLs, and the web as a whole (link metrics) play a critical role in how search engines analyze the web and judge individual sites and pages. Professional SEOs and site owners of all kinds deserve to know more about how their properties are being referenced in such a system. We believe there are thousands of valuable applications for this data and have already put some effort into retrieving a few fascinating statistics: * Across the web, 58% of all links are to internal pages on the same domain, 42% point to pages off the linking site. * 1.83%

"John Mueller explaining that new sites can ultimately use internal linking to funnel Google through the most trusted and quality pages on the site, to earn trust and then get Google to crawl more and more of those pages over time after that trust was earned."

Limit Anchor Text Links To 55 Characters In Length? Blurb by Shaun Building LinksAs a seo I wanted to know - how many words or characters does Google count in a link? What's best practice when creating links - internal, or external? What is the optimal length of a HTML link? It appears the answer to the question 'how many words in a text link" is 55 characters, about 8-10 words. Why is this important to know? 1. You get to understand how many words Google will count as part of a link 2. You can see why you should keep titles to a maximum amount of characters 3. You can see why your domain name should be short and why urls should be snappy 4. You can see why you should rewrite your urls (SEF) 5. It's especially useful especially when thinking about linking internally, via body text on a page. I wanted to see how many words Google will count in one 'link' to pass on anchor text power to a another page so I did a test a bit like this one below; 1. pointed some nonsense words in one massive link, 50 words long, at the home page of a 'trusted' site 2. each of the nonsense words were 6 characters long 3. Then I did a search for something generic that the site would rank no1 for, and added the nonsense words to the search, so that the famous "This word only appear in links to the site" (paraphrase) kicked in 4. This I surmised would let me see how many of the nonsense words Google would attribute to the target page from the massive 50 word link I tried to get it to swallow. The answer was….. 1. Google counted 8 words in the anchor text link out of a possible 50. 2. It seemed to ignore everything else after the 8th word 3. 8 words x 6 characters = 48 characters + 7 spaces = a nice round and easy to remember number - 55 Characters. So, a possible best practice in number of words in an anchor text might be to keep a link under 8 words but importantly under 55 characters because everything after it is ignored

"They have a guide to Link Score here"

this is not a fad or SEO gimmick - it really does work

Oct 7, 2008 at 8:11am Eastern by Barry Schwartz Google Webmaster Central Hosting "Link Week" This week at the Google Webmaster Central blog, Google has a series of blog posts all about links. The first two blog posts are live and are named: * Links information straight from the source * Importance of link architecture Google explains that they will be writing about three main topics this week. (1) Internal links, the links that you have within your site. That post is already live and is about the how you should structure your link structure for best search engine visibility. (2) Outbound links or the links you post on your pages to other sites. I assume Google will discuss the value of these links and who you should and should not link to. Clearly, think about your user here and not the search engine. (3) Inbound links or the external sites that are linking to your site. I assume Google left this for last, because this may be the most interesting topic. Google plans to bust some myths, so it will be interesting to see what they say on the topic of links hurting your site. Time will tell - but stay tuned for more information. Postscript: Here is Google's post on linking outbound, which has useful tips for beginners on who and when to link out. In addition, it tells you how to handle user generated content links. Postscript 2: I was a bit let down by Google's inbound link post.

Oct 13, 2008 at 5:28pm Eastern by Vanessa Fox Google Webmaster Tools Now Provide Source Data For Broken Links Ever since Google Webmaster Tools started reporting on broken links to a site, webmasters have been asking for the sources of those links. Today, Google has delivered. From Webmaster Tools you can now see the page that each broken link is coming from. This information should be of great help for webmasters in ensuring the visitors find their sites and that their links are properly credited. The value of the 404 error report Why does Google report broken links in the first place? As Googlebot crawls the web, it stores a list of all the links it finds. It then uses that list for a couple of things: * As the source list to crawl more pages on the web * To help calculate PageRank If your site has a page with the URL www.example.com/mypage.html and someone links to it using the URL www.example.com/mpage.html, then a few things can happen: * Visitors who click on that link arrive at the 404 page for your site and aren't able to get to the content they were looking for * Googlebot follows that link and instead of finding a valid page of your site to crawl, receives a 404 page * Google can't use that link to give a specific page on your site link credit (because it has no page to credit) Clearly, knowing about broken links to your site is valuable. The best solution in these situations generally is to implement a 301 redirect from the incorrect URL to the one. If you see a 404 error for www.example.com/mpage.html, then you can be pretty sure they meant to link to www.example.com/mypage.html. By implementing the redirect, visitors who click the link find the right content, Googlebot finds the content, and mypage.html gets credit for the link. In addition, you can scan your site to see if any of the broken links are internal, and fix them. But finding broken links on your site can be tedious (although it's valuable to run a broken l