Search Engine Optimisation – Diagnosis Website!
I spend some of my time at work reviewing customers’ websites that have slipped back in the SERPs. The reasons behind the slipping could be anything: Perhaps the competition has been upping their game to increase their backlinks, or, their copy is more keyword rich than ours, or, maybe Google has just had a blip? It’s my job to find out why the site has slipped and to do the work (or recommend to someone else what needs to be done) to push the site back to its rightful position as number 1, page 1 (we accept nothing less!)
Initially I will do a range of checks to assess what needs to be done to improve the site. The first thing I’ll do is check out the competition, asking myself these kinds of questions:
- How many backlinks do they have?
- Can I get backlinks from the same place as them?
- Does their site look better than ours? (Usually, the answer to this question is a very definite “NO!”)
- What’s their content like, is it ‘salesy’ or is it bland and boring? Is it better than ours?
Once I’ve answered these questions, got a load of backlinks and checked the functionality of our site I will do a test for Duplicate Content.
The negative effect of Duplicate Content on SEO
I use Copyscape to find out if someone has copied our customers’ content. I am sorry to say I have lost count of the number of times that I’ve found duplicate content present on struggling sites. Plagiarism has a very real and negative effect on websites.
Sometimes Google thinks the site being copied is the one that has done the copying, and so penalises the wrong site. The Moral is: If you have difficulty writing your copy, whatever you do, don’t copy someone else’s! It may seem like a good idea at the time, but it’s really not.
If your site has been plagiarised then you can follow the steps recommended by Copyscape. However, by that stage, you’re probably best re-writing your copy anyway to ensure that it has original content. Quite often this is enough to bring the site back to where it should be. But, you do have to wait for indexing, which can be agonising!
To prevent plagiarism from happening again, Copyscape has a list of steps to follow. We always place a © declaration in the footer of all our sites, but this deterrent isn’t as effective online as it should be. The only way to ensure your content doesn’t get copied is to regularly update it. This is generally good for SEO anyway; so there really is no harm in it, just more work for the honest Webmaster.
