I see a lot of you are linking to our inspection articles from your inspection business websites. That is doing you no good in terms of search engine optimization.
Instead, copy each article (not just a link back to InterNACHI) and make a separate webpage out of it on YOUR inspection business website.
These articles are designed to improve your search engine ranking, but only if you bring them over to your website and add content to your website. You don’t even have to link to the pages you build from your homepage. But , it does no good to just link to www.nachi.org/articles.htm
The articles are copyrighted for member use… so use them. You paid for them.
This is a good project to do over the Christmas Holiday.
At the very least, Google will not give you bit of credit if it suspects you copied the content. The site will look nice but that’s it. Too much copied content and down you go. When they say unique content helps with SEO, they mean unique.
Bob, do you know anyone who has suffered the wrath of Google? I know of an inspection school in Northern NJ, and two inspectors, who’s sites are loaded with blind text and stuffed keywords. Black hat stuff like that is supposed to get you banned from the search engine. I know of this going on on those sites for a year and a half now. I know that spiders have had to crawl their sites.
I do not condone this stuff at all, and wouldn’t do it myself. I just wonder how closely Google really checks.
You guys must change around quite a bit of the content. Otherwise if you add too many of these articles your site ranking will suffer. It won’t be banned (duplicate content isn’t a bannable offense) but if the articles make up a good percentage of your site and you haven’t changed them then your site is no longer unique and not relevant to Google. The articles are great starting blocks, but you must rewrite (I’d say 30-40%). 1-2 lines isn’t good enough. I can take any page and tell you where content came from as long as there’s 5 words in a row.
Drew, yes I know many sites that have been blacklisted for awhile. I’ve also seen ranks drop like a stone.
There are all kinds of old wives tales about google banning sites. It may have been true long ago, but not today. The one you always hear is that if you have multiple domains pointing to your website, google will blacklist you. Nonsense. Maybe years ago… until the first jerk like me registered a dozen domain names and pointed them to their competitor.
I’ve seen sites banned in the last 6 months. The page rank will have a gray bar rather than a ranking. Banning isn’t the main problem though, it’s getting your website ranking killed. Having multiple domains pointing to one was never a problem, it was when you had multiple domain names masking one site (i.e. go to multiple sites but they all show the same content from the same site but the domain names are all different). Google can also see who owns a domain name to make sure it’s the same owner. That’s still an offense that can get you banned, but more likely will also result in duplicate content penalties instead.
I don’t see why duplicate content could possibly get you banned. For what reason? Ever hear of the Associated Press? They author news articles every few minutes and that exact content is copied and pasted on not just a few sites, but hundreds of thousands!
Press releases from everyone from the Bagel Toaster Manufacturer’s Association to the White House are duplicated word for word all over the world.
Public stock corporations have their quarterly reports and forecasts duplicated word for word by every stockbroker from here to Beijing.
The U.S. Constitution is available word for exact word on millions of websites.
I don’t believe for a second that google gives a rats *** about duplicate content in a world where there are far more information outlets than information.
