Search Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG)
Editor: Matt Paines

| This News Blog is dedicated to bringing news, information and innovations targeting the Search Engine Optimisation industry.

Meta Tags and Plagiarism, getting it wrong can be painful.

For a long time, we as an organisation have been promoting the need to "tick all the boxes". There is no single thing you can do to get to the top of the search engines and stay there. But the combined effect of doing everything that is within the rules will, with time, deliver results.

So how can duplication and having the wrong meta tags actually hurt your site. If a page is identified as duplicated either on your site or someone else's -i.e. plagiarized there is a real risk of that page being placed in Google's Supplementary Index, which means you'll find pages not having PageRank and the page content not being indexed and therefore not being searchable by Google.

Plagiarism

Recently a number of would be SEO's from around the planet decided to copy some of the content on our website and put it out as their own. The effect of this was to cause several of our pages to become unread and un- searchable in Google. After several months several Solicitors letters and various threats - isn't the DMCA wonderful, most of the offenders have rectified the situation - although for those that still haven't there will be a name and shame!!!

Anyway back to the point - the duplication caused the pages affected to go into Google's Supplemental Index. So my advise to all webmasters- keep a track on your content - don't duplicate your own content - and enforce your copyrights.

Meta Tags

The other way to end up triggering a supplemental index problem is by being lazy when constructing sites. Using no meta headers, or duplication from one page to another is bad news.

A recent example of this was about a week ago. One of our biggest problems is that we end up as unpaid consultants on a regular basis, not by design and much to our annoyance but it does happen. Imagine our surprise then when we get a call from someone we haven't spoken with in two years, who at the time used us (quite unashamedly) as a free consultant.

As expected he darkened our door because he has a problem with his site. Huge numbers of pages had no PageRank and had the phrase
- Supplemental Result - after his URL in a search on Google. This is not uncommon to see and is caused by the webmasters laziness not to build unique header/meta content on each page.

If you feel you are suffering the same problem go to Google, and search for a page you know exists. Type in the search box the page name followed by site: and the domain name- (it will look like this)

page name site:www.yoursite.com

In the resulting list if any of the pages say - Supplemental Result - then you have a problem with either no, poor or duplicated headers, duplicated content on your site or someone is plagiarizing your content.

I really am going to have to stop being a fee SEO Consultant, but I guess that's the nature of the game...ah well back to earning a living.

M.P

Adv