Answer: Excellent question. The fact is there are a few ways to ensure you are chosen as the primary content provider. The best option is to require that all who syndicate your content provides a inline text link directly to your original posting of the article. For example they would say something like this at the end of the article included in a link: “SEO Answers #15 by Ross Dunn”. This way everyone who repost’s your article is sourcing your content as the original.

If you do not source the original release in this manner the website who publishes your article and gets the most attention for it (via links or publicity measurable by Google) will have a better chance of being chosen as the original content provider.

In conclusion, unless you strictly enforce your ownership to the article you may not get the final credit when Google is forced to guess who published it first.

For more info here is an article on article syndication content duplication I recently wrote.

I have a lot to learn about sending out email newsletters so I constantly keep an eye out for interesting articles on this subject. Well here is one from Lyris that really spoke to me and I expect it will for many of you who are in the same position I am (a newbie).

Essentially the article boils down to one conclusion… using CSS in a newsletter is foolhardy. Why? Well apparently a large portion of email clients and web-based email portals (Hotmail, GMail) ignore CSS. Personally this is bewildering to me since CSS has been so widely adopted but I have long since learned that some things just don’t make sense. As a result, any newsletter formatted with CSS may be entirely unreadable when viewed by an email client; which does not exactly bode well for the success of a CSS-driven newsletter.

Anyway, this is likely a very obvious fact to any of you with more than average experience with newsletters out there. But for those of you who are new to newsletter creation read this article and follow the advice: format the whole newsletter with inline HTML and you are off to the races. You can expect StepForth’s SEO newsletter to be significantly better as a result of this simple change – all CSS has been removed and reformatted in HTML. I am now looking forward to seeing the first readable edition of the Step Forth Weekly Newsletter in GMail next week

All the best this fine weekend – Ross Dunn

In a move that has been long in coming Google has chosen to provide a safer environment for its patrons by blocking access to sites that appear to have malicious code.

The genius, in my opinion, is they are not blocking the sites from appearing but offering a warning under the title of a ‘harmful’ listing. The site may even appear number one and two as in the case of the search phrase “beautiful free screensaver” where the top 2 listings from the same site have the “this site may harm your computer” warning listed below the title. Read more…

Last Wednesday Google released the results of a survey they conducted on the Valentine’s Day shopping habits of 2214 adults. Here is an excerpt of the most interesting data for retailers:

Highlights From Survey Results:

Among U.S. adults who typically buy Valentine’s Day gifts:

• 50% indicated that they purchase multiple Valentine’s Day gifts.
• Although men and women (both 71%) are equally likely to typically buy at least one Valentine’s Day gift, women (56%) are more likely than men (44%) to buy multiple gifts.
• 55% of men indicated that they plan to buy for spouse, compared with 44% of women.
• These adults are more likely to buy Valentine’s Day gifts for their pets (6%) than their fathers (5%) or grandfathers (1%).
• Women (83%) are more likely than men (74%) to indicate that they typically buy a Valentine’s Day gift for at least one family member.
• 41% indicated that they plan to purchase from more than one store/website this Valentine’s Day.
• 11% indicated that they typically spend $10 or less. On average, U.S. adults spend about $70 in total on Valentine’s Day gifts.

Among U.S. adults who typically buy Valentine’s Day gifts for a significant other:

• Men (50%) are more likely than women (37%) to indicate typically buying multiple Valentine’s Day gifts for a significant other.

The purpose of the survey was to pitch the benefits of being found on Google Checkout but either way the information is intriguing.

This SEO answer is a follow-up to a common question I received from my recent article “The Most Common Reason for Dropped Rankings: Duplication“.

To be as clear as possible with my answer I am going to break it down into two sections: one for those who syndicate their own content and the other for those who publish syndicated content.

Please keep in mind, however, duplicate content is not an exact science or anything close to that. As I wrote this article, I often imagined exceptions where a penalty would or would not take place. That said the following answers are based on what my experience dictates to be the most common scenarios. Read more…

Ever since Google stopped showing accurate backlink (aka incoming link) counts to websites webmasters and SEOs have been forced to turn to other, more accurate tools like Yahoo. This hasn’t really been all that bad in my opinion but it is refreshing to hear that Google has finally launched a new backlinks analysis tool within Google Webmaster Central.

I have to say, it rocks! The system allows you to navigate a Google-generated sitemap of your website where at the right side of each page a number appears which denotes the number of backlinks to that page. Then, if you want more information on those backlinks you have only to click on it and a comprehensive list appears; very slick indeed. The list is even downloadable in .csv format.

For more information here is Google’s blog post regarding this update. I hope you enjoy this tool as much as I will. Just keep in mind that Matt Cutts noted the tool is not quite 100% accurate.

It is my pleasure to introduce to you Scott Smith, partner at CopyWriting.Net and copy writing guru. Before you read any further, however, I want to give you a heads up that this is not a normal article from StepForth. This is an unedited interview written in a very personal style. In other words, this is not the normal condensed knowledge that my staff and I try to put out every week. That said, I really wanted to introduce you to Scott because I feel his copywriting skills are top of the line and either his services or his tips may help you shore up your bottom line. If you want to get in touch with Scott Smith he is best contacted by email. Read more…

An interesting, albeit controversial, set of statistics was provided by Compete.com last week outlining the top 20 online properties that a pool of 2,000,000 people spent the most time on in December 2006.

Read more…

Hello all, I wanted to clear up a significant issue with my recent article “The Most Common Reason for Dropped Rankings: Duplication“. It was edited closely but apparently not quite close enough. Please note the following change in a question within the article: Read more…

Yesterday Google’s official webmaster blog announced that Googlebombing will be soon a way of the past thanks to some targeted attention from the search results team. Here is the gist of the posting:

We wanted to give a quick update about “Googlebombs.” By improving our analysis of the link structure of the web, Google has begun minimizing the impact of many Googlebombs. Now we will typically return commentary, discussions, and articles about the Googlebombs instead. The actual scale of this change is pretty small (there are under a hundred well-known Googlebombs), but if you’d like to get more details about this topic, read on.

Ultimately they admit these algorithm changes will not catch every Googlebomb but they expect the changes will clear out the majority.

What is a Google Bomb?