Jeremy Palmer sent a twitter update that often discussed “Duplicate content penalty” has been refuted by Google in a recent webmaster central blog post.

So the word from big G! is:

Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you’re scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines:

• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid… “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If you weren’t already aware, a wordpress blog creates “duplicate content” just because of the way the pages are structured.

A “domain-name/page-1/” and “domain-name.com/blogging/2008/09/10/todays-post.html” might contain the same content. Unless you’re willing to spend a little time setting “no follow” tags on sections on your blog, you are already publishing duplicate content on the web.

I’m not overly disturbed that I might be “slapped” down by the search engines for this duplicate content and think the time could be better spent on growing my business instead.

Where a blog can stand out is to provide “value” to the content publishing process.

It’s been mentioned before that a genuine review (rather than scraped/republished content from other sites) will generate more sales, because it blends the visitors needs for accurate and useful information, together with your attempt to monetize the site.

Secondly, moving from a purely automated/mechanical approach to SEO and linkbuilding to a social traffic-based approach can yield great dividends for your business.

Blogs, in particular, are a great way for existing businesses to ramp up their marketing efforts and for new marketers to get their foot in the door.

For more resources, check out the Secret Blog Weapon.

While not going into the specific nuts-and-bolts factors influencing SERPs (or search engine results pages), Amit outlined a number of broad principles to keep in mind when optimizing your web pages.

Principle 1: “Best locally relevant results served globally”

As I’ve earlier noted, your geographic location, specifically your IP number can determine the search results returned.

Amit’s assurance that they operate on the “no query left behind” principle, meaning every user query gets the most relevant results, is yet another assertion that the “user experience” more so than the affiliate marketer, SEO or even adwords advertiser’s interest is given priority.

If you’ve been following developments (and educated guesses) in the SEO field, you’ll know that meta criteria like “time on site” and other deeper level criteria from Google Analytics (and no doubt, Google own deeper level analytics, and possibly algorithms derived from basic analytics) are being incorporated into these ranking factors.

I applaud the SEOs who’re on the leading edge in following and sometimes trying to step ahead of Google to rank higher in the SERPs. For the average internet marketer, developing a long term sustainable business model and providing original, quality, link worthy content is probably the best route for now.

Principle 2: Keep It Simple

What’s simple to a UC Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon comp sci major might be rocket science to the average man.

Again, the average man-in-the-street marketer is going to be hard pressed to come up with anything innovative, unless you’ve got the technical chops of a BlueHat SEO with his madlib and deeplinking strategies.

As Google has mentioned in its Quality Guidelines, using off-the-shelf software can lead to detrimental results in your rankings (disclaimer: unless you have the technical knowhow to understand the system, rather than keying in your URL and hitting the submit button).

Principle 3: No Manual Intervention

What’s interesting is that the ranking team is making about 10 changes to the algorithm each week, which accounts for the fluctuations in SERP positions (in addition to data from spider data).

Here’s the double-edged sword for marketers and business owners “Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries” – Which explains the phenomenon where a crackdown on MFA (made-for-adsense) sites also takes down legitimate sites – because of a rule-based algorithm. The “trick” is figuring out how to stay on the right side of big G and benefitting from the changes.

Which isn’t difficult if you approach building your online business just like a brick-and-mortar business – based on solid fundamentals, with a long term view and on a sustainable basis.

There’s still talk about Microsoft working with Yahoo! on a collaboration for its search services, but really to leapfrog search engine leader Google, requires a paradigm shift. One possible avenue? The social media game.

Witness the fact that Google hasn’t done much with Blogspot/blogger in the last couple of years.
Services like Google’s Blog Search seemed like a half-hearted implementation.

That’s not to say that Microsoft and Yahoo! are exactly leading the field either.
The Web 2.0 space is still littered with their dying or dead blog services and communities.
A search at Microsoft’s Social Computing Group shows a number of interesting projects, but none really earth shattering to shift the field.

A couple of years ago, Microsoft spun off its own social network Wallop, to fanfare from Mashable and TechCrunch.
So what happened?

For sure, “cloud computing” still seems a distant reality, hobbled by a lack of compelling applications (in contrast, the Japanese with NTT Docomo’s I-Mode service do just about everything with their 3G phones which fold origami-like into small objects of art. Elsewhere in the world, cell phone users rejoice when they get restaurant recommendations or proximity locaters on their phones…).

It could be a good couple of years till mobile devices like the Asus Eee PC go beyond just hobby plaything (remember the Sharp Zaurus?), to becoming task-specific computing devices (ie something useful). Flash memory densities and Sold State Drives have to go through another 2-3 generations to provide adequate computing capacity.

–

Which leaves just enough time for services to evolve beyond merely just providing information via search or recommendations/referrals, to locking in the value chain from start to finish.

You don’t just want to have the name and address of an Italian restaurant…how cool would it be to isolate the location, have it interface with your car’s GPS system, have a pop-up screen showcasing the chef’s recommendations (based on your personal dining preferences) and locking it down to the top 3 recommendations.

If that mechanism is in place, web services could evolve beyond their “gee whiz” geeky sensibilities, to providing a commercial benefit to merchants and consumers.

It might take a futurist or a visionary to put the pieces together, but can’t one of the big guys at least get their social game together now?

Over the past weekend, the microblogging platform seems to have had a major bout of traffic/resource overload and indigestion and went offline for 48 hours or more.

When she came back, she came back sans direct messaging and pagination (I believe it refers to a backlog beyond your first page of tweets).

In addition to conserve resources, third party apps like Twhirl, can’t seem to do API calls more than once every 5 minutes.

This should take a number of steps to increase scalability and stability, although it will take quite a bit away from the “real time” nature of the hybrid IM/blogging type service.

Beyond being a juicy piece of M&A bait for one of the Google-Yahoo-Microsoft tirumvirate, I’m not sure if Twitter has a viable business model, beyond grabbing marketshare and mindshare for the microblogging space.

If you’ve thoughts on the issue, post your comments below:

For “Andrew Wee” from a Singapore IP, here’s the result:

But if I do the same search using a US IP:

Spot the difference?

The expanded listing you see above are what Google calls “Sitelinks”

Some have said sitelinks could be an indicator of your site’s status as an authority site in Google’s eyes.

If that’s true, it makes sense, because about 70-80% of my traffic comes from the US, while about 10% comes from Singapore.

So traffic weightage plays a part in the display of sitelinks.

Back in her Google Webmaster Central days, Vanessa Fox notes that the sitelinks are generated according to an algorithm.

Another finding seems to be that Google is serving up different results depending on your geographic origin. If you’re a major US player, the display of sitelinks might not hold for someone coming from Japan or the UK.

Some interesting food for thought in your site planning efforts.

Just about any PPC marketer will be concerned if they get an email like this because AdWords downtime could translate into a significant of profits.

Before you jump to the page and entering your account information, I checked that the HTML email was going to a *.cn (China-based) domain, so it would be pretty unwise to enter your username or your password.

Mozilla Firefox had earlier been patched with a “phishing site” notification, similarly Internet Explorer showed a similar warning when I tried to access the site.

Just take note of the destination URLs in your emails before clicking on them, also if needed view the message headers and you can usually spot their point of origination (unlikely that the Adwords team would be sending notification emails out of Africa or Russia).

There was also a port about this at KezNews.

I found his site when he first launched his eBay-Amazon-Youtube mashup script, which lets you build an affiliate site easily. Mark has already done the API (application programming interface) work for you, so you can skip around the techie aspects and get round to the business of generating affiliate commissions.

He followed that up with his 19pages.com application, which lets you build a niche site easily, and the best thing about it doesn’t require a MySQL connection, so you can transport it from one webhosting account to another easily. If you’re into site development/site flipping, it can be a handy tool to add value to a site (and increase it’s monetization and asking price too).

He’s since gone on to launch his Top100 “make money online” blog rankings (he developed the code) and it’s generated a fair amount of buzz in the internet marketing blogosphere.

So naturally I had to have him on the Friday Podcast to pick his brains about developing software applications to boost your internet marketing efforts and to directly monetize.

We talked about the building blocks of application development, as well as monetizing your application once it’s good to go.

You can hear our thorough discussion (weighing in at more than an hour long) and hear about his latest project ShowYourAdHere.com in the latest edition of the Friday Podcast accessible below:

Incidentially, Mark is also Blog Captain for the upcoming Affiliate Summit and you can hear about the blog room facilities too.

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank. 

So if you’re selling links, kiss PageRank goodbye.

This would be a good move to shift more human relevant content into the SERPs, although without visibility of it’s PR algorithmn, it’s difficult to judge how a site providing quality content can justify the provision of free content WITHOUT advertising as a revenue stream.

Has Google’s quality score grown to encompass the quality and sophistication of site content?

Or will it be some time before a comprehensive content ranking system makes it’s way into the PageRank system.

–

On the bread-and-butter side of things, I certainly don’t believe that any entrepreneur’s business should be held sway to the whim of a single number…

How much does PageRank really mean, other than “PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.”

Uh huh…Having the monetization of your site held hostage by Larry, Sergei…or even Jerry Yang is certainly an indication that you’re going about things in the wrong way.

If you’re in this position, you certainly need to take an in-depth look at your business, and make it three-dimensional in terms of marketing and monetization, way beyond the one-dimensional reliance on PageRank.

Take it as a wake up call to figuring out the ingredients to generating a substantial income online.

Take the SERPs for Internet Marketer Rachel Rofe:

Her video clip shot during the recent JV Alert seminar is a blurb for The Next Internet Milionaire. Yet it comes in as result 4, a little below her MySpace profile, personal blog and LinkedIn profile.

It certainly looks impressive.

Another search for Internet Marketer Anik Singal, shows a clip from Affiliate Summit 2006 East coming in as result 8 out of 69,300.

This result ranks above his ezinearticles profile page. Pretty amazing.

And expanding the “+ Watch video” tab, opens an embedded player:

So you need not even leave the SERPs to view the video.

Pretty impressive.

Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz also notes that revshare video site MetaCafe’s clips are appearing in Google Video’s results.

If traffic is going to be consolidated at Google’s web properties, would traffic be involuntarily “stuck” at Google or one of its subsites?

More importantly, is this going to be a “good” thing?

Another interesting development has been my discovery of an additional search tab:

For a brief moment, I was able to pull up an additional table with additional options.

I wasn’t able to replicate this result, but it certainly shows that there are more comprehensive search options in store.

Will video be the next step in Google’s content indexing strategy after text-based information?

All the signs seem to indicate so.

Download audio file (WhoIsAndrewWee.com-friday-podcast5.mp3)

For session notes, click more:

What is a trend?

• “Two or more make a trend”
• Pattern
• Once-off or Cyclical

Trendspotting Central: Google News

Seeing trends: Trendspotting:

• Trend blindspots
• Trendspotting value creation

Exhibit: “Apple ipod trend”

Apple ipod gets the FCC nod

Apple hiring iPhone Personal Trainers

Trendspotting benefits:

• Identify traffic surges
• Traffic surges = easy to monetize
• Law of economics = supply and demand
• Retail/fashion buyers/content publishers live on trends “Fall collection”

Trendspotting ID marks / Trendspotting “Optimization”:

• Signature keywords / keyphrases
• Trends.google.com -> trendspot
• Remember cyclical patterns – Christmas gift/electronics blitz

Exhibit: “Internet Sex Trend”
Google Nude Pic Suit

MySpace vs Sex Offenders

What is URLFan?

If you’re a “Web2.0-ish” person, you’d want to check out this metric type site which ranks sites according to their RSS feeds.

The site description says URLFan is “currently parsing hundreds of gigabytes of RSS content a day”

As of my last visit, URLFan’s stats stand at “Reading 746,006 feeds, parsing 41,334,923 posts, ranking 1,844,043 domains”

Bear in mind that the criterion for ranking is popularity of web feeds. As you know, RSS (really simple syndication) is becoming more widely adopted as the distribution technology of choice for content syndication, whether it’s into your Google Reader (or it’s equivalent at your My Yahoo! page) or the Mozilla Thunderbird email/RSS client.

Out of curiosity, I pulled the top ranked sites according to URLFan:

With content sites, not surprisingly, dominating the top positions.

Interestingly, YouTube and Flickr, rank highly despite the fact that the bulk of their content is video and graphic-based. I suspect it has to do with the content’s title and tags.

The lesson here is if you’re not already tagging your content, you should start today!

I thought it’d be interesting to see how bloggers ranked, so I ran some blogs through the engine.

Problogger
Ranks 150 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 927 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 1543 posts.

Shoemoney
Ranks 1036 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 219 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 387 posts.

JohnChow
Ranks 1170 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 200 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 341 posts.

TopRankBlog
Ranks 1680 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 146 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 254 posts.

ConversionRater
Ranks 8265 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 40 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 68 posts.

AffiliateTip
Ranks 8438 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 40 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 64 posts.

WhoIsAndrewWee.com
Ranks 12688 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 28 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 31 posts.

Jim Kukral
26190 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 15 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 17 posts.

PepperJamBlog
Ranks 27113 out of 1,844,043 sites
Mentioned in 18 unique feeds.
Mentioned in 21 posts.

So does it mean that a “low” ranking on the URLFan scale means your site is “bad”?

That’s hardly the case.

Remember URLFan is primarily using RSS as the metric.

If you’re not actively promoting your RSS feed, or pushing traffic into your list (like I do), then you’ll score lower.

And remember too, that traffic quantity is not the entire picture.

Traffic quality (the type of visitor you are attracting) is as and could be more important.

I’d rather than 1,000 relevant and targeted visitors to my site, rather than 10,000 untargeted ones (who might come once and never come back).

When planning your online marketing strategy, always look at the big picture.

A contact mentioned that Google had updated Toolbar PageRank ratings last week.

I hadn’t noticed changes on my blog, but some of my content sites have done from PR3 to PR4. Fairly decent consider that they’re a little over 6 months old.

As mentioned in previous PageRank-related posts, take note that Toolbar PageRank is different from your Live PageRank which is registered at the datacenters and determine how frequently your site is indexed by the search engine spiders.

You can find out your Toolbar PageRank by installing the Google Toolbar.

But more effective than the Toolbar PR, which some would say is ‘old PR’ is the live PR, which can be accessed through the Live PR datacenter check.

Backlinks (one way links to your blog or website) determine PageRank.

If you haven’t already, the following are some of the methods to generate backlinks:

• Article Submissions
• Press Release Submissions
• Publishing RSS feeds
• Participating in blogging competitions

For new Internet Marketers, starting a blog might be an easier prospect.

But if you’d prefer to focus on site design and your concept, you can consider buying a high PR text link from a website in a related niche.

I’d recommend Text Link Ads.

Doing a search for “affiliate marketing” shows the Wiki entry at the top position for the organic results.

Should Wiki entries be so dominant? Especially as the members of the SEOmoz team point out other high authority sites might provide more comprehensive and relevant information?

As Shoemoney pointed out in his posts Google Video #1 Rank – What Kind Of Traffic Does It Bring? and Top Commentors MyblogLog Integration, the evolution of alternative high authority, high traffic sites like Google Video and MyBlogLog can bring huge amounts of traffic.

Now think about Wikipedia, which generates loads of traffic, coupled with it’s dominance at the SERPs. Can you imagine how a well-placed Wiki can drive hordes of qualified, focused traffic to a site?

A good podcast to kick off SEOmoz’s series (I believe they’re planning another 4).

I liked the content and it’s great to put a face to the team.

My feedback consists of two points:

• Tighter framing

I’m a fan of closely cropped photos and videos, which draw your eyes to the focus of attention. I’d probably have framed the shot like this:

• Publicly Hosted Bugbears

As with all hosted video services, the service will attempt to serve up relevant video content. At the end of this clip, the following “related” clips popped up:

While the “Shoe Shop prank” and “Mixed Armwrestling” clips might be irrelevant to Wikipedia and Google rankings, they could be good for a laugh.

Having “Cheating Wife” served up (even if it’s a joke clip), tends to detract from the informational nature of the clip.

The alternative would be to host the clips on a dedicated server, though the potential bandwidth resources would escalate exponentially, especially if the post ranks high on Digg and other services.

—

While you’re over at SEOmoz, you might like to check out Matt Inman and Rand’s Page Strength tool.

The purpose of the tool as listed is to:

I ran the tool on this domain and got the following summary:

Accompanying the summary is a comprehensive set of information, including dominance in the search engines, backlinks, link from .edu and .gov domains (I was surprised to see my blog listed at: Online gaming: Moral panic in Singapore), internal site links and others.

You can see the Page Strength results for WhoIsAndrewWee.com.

And the Page Strength tool can be found here.

In the works too are a variety of interesting SEO-related tools, I’m sure it’ll be worth checking out once they’re launched.

I checked my Live PR at the Google datacenters:

My Google Toolbar PR displays a 3, though it may be headed to a PR5 at the end of this exercise. Some of my other sites look like they may be moving up a notch.

This is encouraging because I’ve mostly focused on a content-based approach (except for a brief period where I felt I was excessively focused on meta and H1 and H2 optimization). Looks like the organic route has worked out well.

If you’re like to check the Live PR for your sites from the Google Datacenters, check out the following:

• iWebtool PageRank Check

• Live PageRank

It looks like the PR score that iWeb reports from toolbarqueries.google.com might give you the PageRank that’s displayed on your toolbar.

Did your PageRank change? Share your results in the comments.

And the wait is over.

To be frank, I have been mucking about with blogging till about a week ago.

That’s when Malaysia-based star blogger Gobala Krishnan launched his WordPress Adsense System. I call it my SecretBlogWeapon.

What is it?

It’s an integrated product containing an insider guide to the WordPress blogging platform, with all the plug-ins and templates to give you flexibility in developing a corporate, hobby or Google Adsense contextual advertising-optimized blog.

Speaking of Adsense, he includes the ‘Top 5 Adsense secrets you’ll ever need to know‘ and approaches to build niche content (which gives you greater traffic and income earning power) as well as methods to generate traffic and original content for your site.

There’re also other goodies like a comprehensive SEO guide and a ‘profitable blogging’ ebook.

All in, it’s great value and beats some of the products that I’ve paid more than double the price for.

Gobala mentioned that depending on demand the price might be adjusted. So do check it out now at SecretBlogWeapon.

As a bonus, having recently implemented it, I am available to help the next few bloggers who purchase it and have difficulty along the way (but not likely as the ebook is well-written).

If you have to plan to go Internet Marketing, be sure to bring your Secret Blog Weapon