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One of the most frequently asked questions about websites and search engine positioning is, “Why is my site not ranked well on Google?”  After all of your SEO efforts and those of your current search engine optimization company, your page rankings are not where they need to be.  With this article I will provide few simple tips for dentists that will help you easily diagnose your “website woes”.

There are three major problems we frequently encounter that lead to poor rankings in the search engines.  Today I will address the first problem: duplicate content.  If you have text on your website that is identical to the text on another website then you have a duplicate content issue.  Often times website companies provide you with an information library, FAQ page, or article library describing your services.  The website company will use the same articles on hundreds and even thousands of websites.

Why is duplicate content such a bad thing for SEO?
Duplicate content is a huge red flag to Google and the other major search engines.  They are trying their best to identify and increase rankings for the websites that contain the best information and identify and decrease rankings for websites with lesser quality information.  Now imagine you are a search engine who has found an article about cosmetic dentistry and the same article is found on fifty more websites across the web.  Google identifies the duplicate content and may subsequently penalize the website in the rankings.  For search engine optimization purposes high quality content must be both unique and relevant to the website.

How do you know if your website is laden with duplicate content?
If the content for your website was provided by your web design company there are a couple of ways to find out if it is unique.  Copyscape is a FREE tool whereby you can input the URL from your web pages and it will scan the entire internet to see if your content is found on any other indexed website.  Simply go to www.copyscape.com and you will see a field to enter your URL.  If your content is found anywhere on the web it will be returned in your results.   Another easy way to find duplicate content is to copy a sentence from your website, place it in quotes in the Google search bar and search it.  Your search result will include any websites with that specific sentence.

If you would like us to take a look at your site for you, simply leave your information on www.elementseo.com and a member of our SEO team will email you with a FREE custom analysis.

Robert L. Smith DMD.

For the past few years internet marketers and Search Engine Optimization Firms have used “link sculpting,” a technique to channel valuable “link juice” to some of the more important pages and exclude others that that they are not monetizing, such as a contact us page or shopping cart pages. You may have heard by now that this has changed significantly.

How it Works

Here’s the basic rundown of how it would work. If a page had 10 “PR points” then those ten points were divided equally between all of the outgoing links. If there was a finite amount of link juice that a page had to give out, obviously it would be desirable for website owners and SEOs to manipulate where and how that juice was divided. Most often link sculpting was used to give the majority of the juice including their corresponding rankings to the pages they could monetize the most. By adding a “no-follow” attribute to a link, it would stop the flow of link juice to that specified url and preserve it to be distributed in another way. For example, if there were a total of ten links on a page and five of them were no-follwed, that would allow two PR points to go to each of the remaining five urls instead of one to each of the ten.

How it works now

Matt Cutts, leader of Google’s Search Quality team, announced a few weeks ago that Google has made modifications to it’s algorithm changing the way no-follows work. A no-follow attribute will no longer preserve any link juice for redistribution. It will still prevent flow from going to the undesired url, but is not able to be used in any other way. To determine the amount of link juice that each link is given, Google will take the total PR points for a given page and divide it by the number of outgoing links…. Period.

Why?

So why would Google change the way it counts no-followed links? My personal opinion is that they want complete control over which pages show up well in the SERPS and for you to have as little influence on that as possible, except as it would relate to natural elements of your site. This makes sense from a search engine’s point of view. Here is a Q&A taken form Matt Cutts’ blog on the subject.

“Q: Why did Google change how it counts these links?”
A: For one thing, some crawl/indexing/quality folks noticed some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites, but those sites ended up excluding sections of their site that had high-quality information (e.g. user forums).”

I don’t think this is the real reason. First of all, it doesn’t make sense. If you look at Google’s information page about the rel=”nofollow” attribute they state that the purpose is to “not pass page rank” to the destination page, that you “cannot vouch for the content” of the destination page and “crawl prioritization” to name a few. Don’t get crawl prioritization confused with “we will not crawl this link”. Crawl prioritization was implemented because Google used to only crawl up to 141K per page, so only 75 links or so would get crawled. You could then assign which ones were of least importance by adding the no-follow attribute. But it doesn’t mean it won’t get crawled. Many tests have shown that a page can still get indexed even if the only link pointing to it is no-followed. Google now has the capability of crawling several times what it used to per page and you can have “hundreds of links on a page” (Matt Cutts, site review session from Google I/O. May 28, 2009) and they will all get crawled. So changing the way Google sees no-followed links because “sites ended up excluding sections of their site that had high-quality information (e.g. user forums).” just doesn’t add up. They will all get indexed anyway. The argument could be made that they want to rank these pages higher and it has nothing to do with indexing, but that’s not what I took away from the session in Google I/O where it was discussed and later posted by Matt on his blog.

The Effects

Webmasters and SEOs will need to take a closer look at the importance of every link that is on a page since all of them, no-followed or not, will be draining link juice.