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Is Google slapping you with “duplicate content” penalty? Do you know what that penalty looks like? What if it wasn’t a penalty… but instead…

…the Google “penalty” was a service to your readers?

There’s always two sides to every coin, and we’re going to look at both sides in this article on titles.

You’ll also see a way to get your titles clustered onto the first page of Google search results, and you will have proof positive of exactly how important titles are for search ranking.

What a great deal!

You know, I had a wack dream the other night. I was talking to Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. I swear this is true, because I hardly ever remember dreams. (If you don’t who Prof. Knuth is, no worries, just skip ahead to the rest of the article.)

The dream went something like this: I was talking to someone else, and Prof. Knuth was eavesdropping down the hall (weird, I know).
Then he said something like “Nobody follows me!” (a patently absurd remark, he has legions of fans).

I replied with:

“People want to make their own mark on the world.”

Then Prof Knuth and I were off talking earnestly about contributing to the TeX community (which I have) and whatnot. Very peculiar. I don’t think it means anything more than I’m kind of a geek down deep, but it’s as close as I’m liable to get to speak to Prof. Knuth, so I’m cool with it.

What about you: Do you want to make your own mark on the world? I know I do, but that’s a long story for another time. In the meantime, perhaps we can make a mark or two on the world of WordPress.

Duplicate content penalty doesn’t exist!

The first thing you need to know is that there is no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” I know this to be true because Google says so; here’s proof:

• Demystifying the “duplicate content penalty”
• Duplicate content due to scrapers

Now, that being said, Google will “aggregate” results that appear similar to their indexing algorithm. These aggregated results are often displayed as “Show more results from yourwebsite.com,” with a hyperlink that will unfold to display… more results.

(Screenshots coming, below.)

First, let’s a take a detour and examine a technique I am using successfully to rank very high on Google search results. Frankly, I probably shouldn’t post this publicly. It’s going to get ripped off, scraped and reposted all over the web and other web sites are going to get credit for my techniques. You can almost always count on “SEO might equal SEO right,” regardless of how fair or unfair it is.

In any case…

Create your own keywords

Instead of pursuing other people’s keywords, consider creating keywords you practically own outright.

Somebody has to do it.

I’m doing it myself; I own a number of “Practical Tips” domains. For example, I own “Practical SEO Tips.” I have enough of these (about a dozen) that I believe I could easily dominate searches once I established the notion that a “practical tip” was worth searching for. At the moment, Website In A Weekend totally dominates the phrase “Practical WordPress Tip,” and I’ll prove it in a screenshot below. There Is No Box is creating the “Practical Productivity Tips” series, which I believe will rank very highly once a couple of dozen productivity tips are published.

If this isn’t reason enough, consider Brian Clark’s advice on targeting niche phrases as part of his Magnetic Headlines series.

However, if you want to see how powerfully your title element and blog post title (H1 element) affect search results, read on!

Practical WordPress tips

I own the “Practical WordPress Tip” keyword phrase. Here’s some screenshots to prove it:

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The above shot shows “Similar Results” folded. I suspect that many people – include SEO experts – would regard this as a “duplicate content penalty” where Google “slaps” a website for having too much content that’s too similar.

Personally, I don’t mind, and here’s why.

As a reader, I like the folded results. It keeps the results clean, providing both depth (many articles from the same site) and breadth (many different sites) all on the same page. In this case, the first page of Google SERPs.

Putting on my marketing hat, I give you this:

I would like to be able to stand on both sides of the counter at once.’ Julius Rosenwald

I’ll take the folding “penalty” to have ALL my articles available on the first page! Let’s unfold it and take a look:

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I like it!

Again, this works for me because I’m not hard-selling from any of these pages, and I don’t consider myself to have a lot of real competition in the DIY WordPress market.

Ok that’s a little too egotistical… maybe a little delusional… let’s try again: Given I keep up my current pace of 2-4 very high quality articles on WordPress for the next year or so, I believe Website In A Weekend will be one of the top WordPress sites on the internet.

Also, my goal for the Practical WordPress series is to get readers sucked into the series, such that they read them all in a row! Since these articles are all linked into a chain, all I need is to get a reader into the first one, and let the links to the previous and next tips do the work for me.

Next is a slightly different technique, where I’m tagging an entire series of posts such that the reader has access to the entire series once they get into one of the “Unleash WordPress” articles.

Unleash WordPress

“Unleash WordPress” is a second series of posts, covering material that is intermediate in scope. Here’s what the search results look like:

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Let’s take a look at the unfolded version:

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As you can see, Website In A Weekend has a pretty good grip on “Unleash WordPress” as well.

Penalty is perspective

As you can see, the so-called duplicate content penalty can work for you, or against you, and it’s mostly a matter of your perspective. This article contains keywords for both the “practical” and “unleash” series, so it will further reinforce search results on both of those terms in this context. If either of the terms gets popular (and they will when I start to earn money), the spammers, scammers and associated black hats will horn in to siphon my traffic away. Having parasites is simply a side effect of success. In some respect it’s a high quality problem, and I’m not going to worry about it too much right now.

One other very important result is demonstrated in the screenshots above:

Your HTML title elements and article title h1 elements are heavily weighted by Google.

We’ll pick this conversation up again on titles in the near future.