You know you’re traveling too much when you have to fly to the town where you live in order to speak at a conference. But indeed, I flew into Seattle just in time for SMX Advanced. I spoke about duplicate content, but since the panel was a summit format, it was mostly designed to get feedback from the audience about how search engines could make the lives of webmasters easier. And since it was an advanced audience, I figured they mostly knew about duplicate content issues already and I may as well just dive right into getting feedback rather than spend time on the basics. So, I did the logical thing and just talked about Buffy.
Buffy had to deal with duplicate content issues a lot. It’s quite possible she’s gotten tired of all that vampire slaying and is now off doing SEO.
Speaking of duplicates, fuzzy, good Willow or evil Willow? Here are some pictures to help you decide.
Fuzzy Sweater Willow
Evil Leather Outfit Willow
The Second Evil Willow
(A non-Buffy tangent: The question I got most often after the session was about the supplemental index. Does having duplicate content cause sites to be placed there? Nope, that’s mostly an indirect effect. If you have pages that are duplicates or very similar, then your backlinks are likely distributed among those pages, so your PageRank may be more diluted than if you had one consolidated page that all the backlinks pointed to. And lower PageRank may cause pages to be supplemental.)
Now back to your regularly scheduled Buffy.