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Copying content from other sources on the web for your own blog will hurt your search engine ranking. Google (and other search engines) take into account the "uniqueness" of a site's content (text and images) in their ranking algorithms.

If a site (or page on a site) mainly consists of text or images copied from another website they will usually rank poorly. Just changing the order of the paragraphs will not help either, or just copying just a segment of the text. If you want to duplicate content safely it needs to be completely rewritten.

This also applies to "quoting" from another source. Quoting is fine, but make sure that no more than 1/3 of the text of your post consists of a quote from another source. Copying an entire article, and then putting a link to the source after it with a few quick comments is not a good idea either. You would be better off simply having just the link and your short comments without the copied text.

In summary? Quality unique text and image content is best.

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Posted By: jon - Category: Orble Tips, Search Engines, Google

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Incoming Links and Blogrolls

October 4th 2007 06:32

Most successful blogs obtain a large percentage (80% or more) of their traffic from search engines so it's very important to know how they work.

Search engines rank websites by counting the number of other websites which link to them -- called incoming links. The more incoming links your website has the higher your ranking will be for search terms relevant to the content on your site. However it's actually more complicated that this:

1) Links from important websites count for more. How do the search engines tell if another website is important? By counting the number of websites which point to it, and so on and so forth. A link from an important website can be worth 100 or more regular links.

2) Links from sites which are of a similar topic to yours are worth more. For a website devoted to chess, links from other chess websites are worth more than regular links.

3) Older links are better. The longer a link has existed the more it is worth.

4) New links should be spread evenly over time. Search engines figure that websites with good content will obtain links at a fairly steady rate. This basically means that you should put a little effort into getting links every week rather than going nuts for a week and then leaving it.

That's the bare basics. Again it's actually much more complicated than what I've described. Most people think (completely guess) that Google has over 100 different factors that it takes into account when ranking a website for a given search query, and the importance of these factors are probably interdependent creating a non-linear, probably chaotic system, where predicting how a given site will rank is almost impossible.

In fact it's suspected that Google now employs actual people to double check the quality of most high-ranking sites. All the different rules will apply to different degrees to different websites depending on how they fair under all the other rules -- for instance if a website already has lots of incoming links then Google is probably not too worried about the rate that new incoming links appear. But for the purposes of our discussion the above 4 rules will be enough.

So how do I get incoming links to my blog?

1) Write your blog with Orble

All the Orble blogs link to other Orble blogs automatically giving them a great head start in the search engine wars. This is one of the main advantages of joining a blogging network.

2) Write amazingly useful and entertaining content. This one is often overlooked but if you have the talent and the time it's probably the best way to get links. If people like your content they will inevitably link to it, and comment about it on other sites. Most of the best Orble blogs have become successful mainly through attracting completely unsolicited links from people who just liked the content.

3) Swap links on a blogroll. A blogroll is a list of links to related blogs which you recommend to your readers. Ask related blogs if they would like to be on your blogroll in exchange for them putting you on theirs. Only link to very high quality blogs. Linking to blogs with low quality content and spammy link getting policies can actually harm your search engine ranking. Giving a link to someone from an Orble blog is a big favour -- you are in effect putting your blog's reputation with the search engines on the line -- so make sure they deserve it. Have a look at this post to see how to set up a blogroll on Orble.

4) Comment on other blogs and forums outside of Orble. Many blogs will allow you to link back to your own blog from theirs if you leave a worthwhile comment. You can search for related blogs using Technorati or Google BlogSearch. Be sure to play by the rules of each blog.

5) Submit your posts to social bookmarking sites. These include Furl.net, Spurl.net, Simpy.com, Digg.com, Delicious, Fark.com, StumbleUpon.com, Reddit.com, and TailRank.com. This can also be a great way to attract new readers.

6) Get all your friends who have websites to link to your blog. This is one of the easiest and most overlooked ways to get quite a few links.

7) Take part in blog carnivals. This is a huge topic in itself and the subject of a post for another day. To find out more either type in "Blog Carnival" into Google or try the relevant Wikipedia page.

There are also a few things that you should definitely not do, which will almost certainly get you banned from Google. Any kind of link exchange program or marketplace is definitely a big no no and don't pay for your site to be submitted to hundreds of search engines. Basically any scheme which makes it seem super easy to get incoming links will probably get you banned. If in doubt don't do it, or leave a comment below and I'll let you know what I think.

By putting a little bit of effort into attracting incoming links you will really notice the benefit in increased traffic from the Search Engines. Even 3 or 4 good links can make the difference between a couple hundred readers per day and a couple of thousand.

If you have any other suggestions for attracting incoming links let us know!

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Posted By: jon - Category: Search Engines, Google

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Don't make sudden large scale changes to your Blog

October 3rd 2007 04:46

A blogger contacted me yesterday asking why Google had suddenly stopped sending her blog traffic. After a bit of questioning I discovered that she had added a number of new categories and had then gone through all the posts on her blog (a couple hundred) and had added them to these categories.

This has the effect of creating a large number of new pages very suddenly. Not only does each new category create a new page, but each new category combination creates another new page if there is a single post that is in both of them. So after creating just 5 new categories she had effectively created around 100 new pages which was about a 50% increase in the overall number. Changing the name of a category (even just one letter) can have the same effect.

Such sudden and large-scale changes (in relation to the number of pages already on a domain) can put off the search engines because they think that such a large amount of new content can't possibly be genuine or useful and so write it off as spam. Good original and useful content is time consuming to produce so they assume that it's usually done slowly. In the real world there are of course exceptions to this rule, however Google has to make simplifying rules to have any chance of crunching the numbers. If you fall outside the rules, however well intentioned, too bad.

Orble's combinatorial category system can be very powerful in attracting SE traffic but you do have to be careful with how you use it.

There are a number of rules to follow to make sure your blog does not suffer the same fate:

1) You can add any number of categories at once to your blog as they will not actually show up until you put a post in them. What you should not do is go through all your old posts at once and add them to a new category. Such changes should be made very slowly, perhaps one old post modified per day.

2) Do not add a post to more than 3 or at most 4 categories at once.

3) Do not add a large number of posts to your blog in one day. By large I mean more than 5. The exception is if you add more than 5 posts every day and always have done. Consistency is the key. If you need to ramp up the number of daily posts you are making do so gradually.

4) Do not make big changes to a large number of posts in one day.

5) Do not delete a large number of posts in one day. If you need to delete a large number of posts do 3 or 4 a week.

6) Don't change the names of your categories. If you absolutely have to change a category's name then it's better to create a whole new category and move the old one into some sort of category graveyard. If you need help doing this post a comment below and I'll show you how it's done.

The basic point is -- sudden and large-scale changes are bad! Try to avoid these and you should stay in Google's good graces. Once your site has been penalised because of large scale changes you probably won't get much google traffic for 3 to 6 months.