Author Archive
A few months later and now Wordpress 2.6 is here …
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Thanks for visiting!Only a few months later and it’s time to upgrade to Wordpress 2.6. As always, you [...]
Have you upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 yet?
Wordpress 2.5 is out and ready for download. This is a major upgrade and with all wordpress releases you should upgrade as soon as possible - especially for security bugs and fixes which may have been resolved with this release.
Here are 10 things you need to know about Wordpress 2.5
No Country for Duplicate Content
A word to the wise - always take free content from your affiliate merchant networks, especially articles with a grain of salt or risk getting penalized by Google for duplicate content.
Love it or hate it, Google has the lion’s share of traffic on the internet. A duplicate content penalty means you could end up in the sandbox, and this will impact your site negatively in two major ways:
- You will see a huuuge decrease in your Pagerank, e.g. pr 6 to a pr 3 or even a pr 4 drop to pr 0!
- You won’t get anymore organic search engine traffic from Google
That last part is the most problematic, because as an affiliate that’s going to hit you in the wallet - the only way you can drive traffic to your sites now are with paid campaigns.Free resources are great, the problem is hundreds or thousands of other affiliates promoting the same product also have access. However, if you’re not the original source of the content, you have a duplicate content problem. When googlebot indexes the web, who gets credit for the original content if more than 1 copy is found?
Duplicate content is a very touchy subject - what’s a webmaster to do if a hot original post gets picked up by a higher ranking SERP site such as Digg or Reddit? Some say the first site to get indexed gets the credit, others say the site with the most relevant links does - because google equates relevant links with authority.
It’s hard to say exactly how Google checks for duplicate content because Google is very secretive about their methods, but Google is very good at catching it. I like to use free content as a springboard to writing my own original content. I try to retain roughly 30% of the free resource (in order to maintain keyword relevancy) and rewrite the other 70%. A big advantage I get from re-writing the free content myself (as opposed to paying someone to do it for me) is that it helps me think of keywords and search phrases for the related ppc campaign.
Either way, the ORACLE has spoken …. How do you deal with duplicate content?
Ultimate Credit Ebook $1500 Cash Prize Giveaway
The Ultimate Credit Ebook is running a Febr
uary contest where every hundredth purchase of their ebook will payout $1500 to one lucky person. The contest runs till the end of February.
Talk about a win-win situation. Improve your Credit Score and get a chance to win some money while you’re at it.
Entry is only open to residents of the United States and you must have a paypal account to be eligible.
Full contest rules are available here.
