Duplicate content doesn’t always end in penalisation
Whether or not duplicate content hurts your site will depend on a few things. Duplication alone will not pose as much of a threat as initially thought. But in order to explain this further, we’ll look at the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines;
“The Lowest rating is appropriate if all or almost all of the MC (main content) on the page is copied with little or no time, effort, expertise, manual curation, or added value for users. Such pages should be rated Lowest, even if the page assigns credit for the content to another source”.
It doesn’t actually make reference to duplicate content explicitly. Instead, it talks about copied content, and there is a difference between the two. Where duplicate content won’t penalise you, copied content most certainly will. Andrey Lipattsey, a Google employee, states that;
“there is no Google duplicate content penalty. It is not called a penalty if Google notices that your content is not unique”.
Copied content is defined by Track Five as;
“any content that someone copied from another domain”.
An example of this would be taking a chunk of text from one website and copying and pasting it into your own to claim it as unique copy, which isn’t the case. Duplicate content, on the other hand, is described by Yoast as;
“all content that is available on multiple locations on or off your site. It often lives on a different URL and sometimes even on a different domain. It mostly happens accidentally or is the result of a sub-par technical implementation”.
Not all search engines place significant value on links when it comes to ranking
Russian search engine; Yandex, is no longer taking links into consideration when it comes to ranking search results and Google might well be heading, very much, in the same direction. Instead, they’re looking to rank websites based on hard facts as opposed to links alone. As such, the trustworthiness of a domain may well help in terms of rising up rankings,especially if Google will start to measure quality by facts, according to the New Scientist.
Rich snippets don’t directly impact your rankings
Google determines the quality of results using search evaluators
Google uses several different algorithms to rank websites accordingly in the SERPs. However, in order to establish the overall quality of the search results, Google employs people who will make precision evaluations themselves – search evaluators. Their job is to evaluate the quality of the results for a number of different searches and they need to follow strict guidelines in order to do this properly.
Search evaluators are hired by Google from different countries and who can speak several languages. This highlights how dedicated Google is to understanding written content that’s presented in another language, besides English. According to Google itself, the Penguin algorithm they adopt affects around 3.1% of all search queries in English and 3% of queries in other languages, such as: German, Chinese and Arabic, for example.
A video on your website homepage will increase that chances of you appearing on page on of Google
A study done by Tubular Insights suggests that videos have a 41% higher CTR than copy. However, the platform on which we decide to upload our videos will impact the ability of your homepage to rank, according to research conducted by Aimclear. Videos are far more engaging and captivating than streams of text ever could be, often conveying more information at once than reading paragraphs of copy.
As you’ve probably guessed already, YouTube dominates Google when it comes to what’s displayed in the SERPs, but there are some other platforms available that seek to challenge YouTube’s dominance in this sense. But how effective would a video be when posted on a website homepage? According to the same research done by Aimclear, nearly 100% of videos that are returned in universal SERPs ranked on the first page on their native platform also.
This then means that, whether direct or indirect, videos are a sure-fire way of executing impeccable SEO tactics and methods. That, coupled with a digital-based strategy, will soon boost rankings. In addition to being engaging, videos can also be shared exceptionally easily on social media platforms, therefore increasing website visitors.
Google will rank certain events based on popularity
According to Google Patents, search engines will rank events based on popularity as opposed to considering the number of inbound links that point directly at an events page. The concept behind the patent is that many events can actually happen in the same region, at the same time.
But people who might be interested in a specific event will then find it more difficult to decide which of the events to attend. In order to make that process easier for prospective attendees, Google will display the most popular, sought-after events. Essentially, Google will receive data about the event along with computing signal scores. Other signals that are used to rank events accordingly include, but are not limited to, the following:
- The generation of ranking events based purely on popularity scores
- Computing a popularity score that’s undergone minor modification for each event, based on the initial ranking
- The generation of the ranking of events that occur in the designated location by ranking those events in accordance with the modified popularity scores
