Tag: Search

Google Penguin Update: More On That Recovery Story From WPMU

One site that got hit by Google’s Penguin update has managed to make a comeback, thanks to Google’s most recent data refresh of the algorithm update. WPMU’s story has been in the spotlight as an example of where a legitimate non-spammy site was hit by an algorithm update designed to attack webspam. We spoke with James Farmer who runs the site (which distributes WordPress themes) about the situation before the recovery, and now he’s shared some more thoughts about the whole thing with WebProNews.

“I’m going to stick my neck out here and say I think we’re going to see a recovery *far better* than the traffic we experienced before,” Farmer tells us. “Which makes me wonder if we were being ‘kind’ [of] penalized before, but that the new penguin update has actually used something (like our social signals, for example) to really stamp that out.”

“Needless to say I’m super happy,” he adds.

Earlier this week, Ross Hudgens from Full Beaker, who provided some assistance and advice to Farmer, blogged about the recovery at SEOmoz. In that post, it mentions that Farmer did some other things to improve quality, beyond the Penguin-specific advice he was given.

“Well, because we didn’t want to appear at all self-promotional we didn’t mention that one of the things we did was to actually eat our own dog food and implement the Infinite SEO plugin we make at DEV (instead of all the other bits and bobs we were using). This gave us a nice clean and unbroken sitemap.”

“Plus, and this one may be significant, given that we’re a WP site, we were getting a bunch of warnings in Webmaster Tools (and via our SEOMoz report) about dodgy URL paramaters (? queries etc.) and so we implemented, finally, canonical URLs from all of the various comment permalinks etc. etc. to the actual posts themselves.”

In the SEOmoz piece, Hudgens wrote:

The most perilous piece of WPMU’s link profile came from one site – EDUblogs.org. EDU Blogs is a blogging service for people in the education space, allowing them to easily set up a subdomain blog on EDUblogs for their school-focused site – in a similar fashion to Blogspot, Typepad, or Tumblr, meaning that each subdomain is treated as a unique site in Google’s eyes. Coincidentally, this site is owned by WPMU and Farmer, and every blog on the service leverages WPMU theme packs. Each of these blogs had the “WordPress MU” anchor text in the footer, which meant a high volume of subdomains considered unique by Google all had sitewide “WordPress MU” anchor text. In what might have been a lucky moment for WPMU, this portion of their external link profile was still completely in their control because of WPMU ownership.

In what I believe is the most critical reason why WPMU made a large recovery and also did it faster than almost everyone else, Farmer instantly shut off almost 15,000 ‘iffy’ sitewide, footer LRDs to their profile, dramatically improving their anchor text ratios, sitewide link volume, and more.

We asked Farmer if the EDUblogs.org situation was the biggest factor in the recovery in his opinion, and whether he thought if that were the only thing that was addressed, the site would have still recovered.

“A commentator on SEOMoz pointed out that WPMUD EV – our main business – is still linked to on Edublogs! And widely too!” he says. “However, as I responded to them, WPMU DEV has actually seen a significant growth (12%) in Google traffic in the last month, the second biggest monthly unseasonal bump there in the last couple of years.”

“So I think that the removal of edublogs links may have been a factor, in fact I reckon it was a factor, but I think that Google identifying the strength of the site through our social presence and tweaking Penguin appropriately was the real deal,” he adds.

“As we’ve been 100% above board with everything we’ve done and have to offer, I really hope we were a poster child for how Google could improve its results,” Farmer says.

When WPMU first came into the spotlight, Google’ Matt Cutts had pointed out some specific problem link examples, which came in the footers of some WordPress themes that appeared on spam blogs. Part of Farmer’s post-Penguin strategy has been to request the removal of these links.

“I don’t think anyone gets good referrals from footer links, apart from possibly great designers who insist on credits,” he says. “To me it was always just a ‘part of the same company’ thing. Iit just made sense, [but] clearly not!”

“I think that if we do add them back it’ll be 100% branded and on relevant pages only (ie. the homepage, about page for the company). I think that given the relevance we’ll dofollow them,” he says.

While he’s certainly a little biased in this department, Farmer says he thinks Google’s results in general have gotten better with the most recent Penguin refresh, saying “it’s like manna from heaven. Thank you for listening Google!”

In a new post, Farmer says he’s getting record referrals since the latest Penguin update.

Image: Batman Returns (Warner Bros.)

May 31, 2012
Google Shopping (“Paid Inclusion” Results) To Replace Product Search

Google is changing Google Product Search to Google Shopping, and building it on product listing ads.

“When searching for great local restaurants, people want places to eat right there on the results page, not another click or two away. It’s the same with hotels, flight options, directions and shopping,” says Sameer Samat, Vice President of Product Management, Google Shopping. “Organizing these types of data can be very different from indexing the Web, because the information is often not publicly available. It requires deep partnerships with different industries—from financial services and travel to merchants who sell physical goods.”

This sounds very much like those paid inclusion results Danny Sullivan reported on this week, which we talked about here. Sullivan talked about Google “sponsored” results, which are being found in searches for hotels, flights and financial services – all of which are mentioned in Google’s announcement today. He quoted Google’s Amit Singhal as saying:

“Fundamentally, time and time again, we started noticing that a class of queries could not be answered based upon just crawled data…We realized that we will have to either license data or go out and establish relationships with data providers…To be super safe, where we have a deal between Google and another party, we didn’t want to call those fully organic results, because they are based on a deal…After much debate, we said “OK, let’s be extra cautious. Let’s call it ‘sponsored’ so that we tell our users that there’s a special relationship that Google has established with someone.”

In today’s announcement, Samat says, “We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality data—whether it’s accurate prices, the latest offers or product availability—should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.”

Google talks about how to create a new product listing ad here:

The transition from Google Product Search to Google Shopping will be complete in the fall, Google says. Google is giving Merchants who create product listing ads by August 15, a 10% monthly credit of their total Product Listing Ad spend through the end of the year. Current Product Search merchants can get $100 AdWords credit toward the ads if they fill out a form before that date.

Google says ranking in Google Shopping will be based on “a combination of relevance and bid price,” the same as Product Listing Ads today, and those who want to stand out can participate in Google’s Trusted Stores program. The program saw a limited launch last fall:

Merchants will also be able to standout, using special offers, Google says.

In Google.com results, the Shopping results will appear as “sponsored,” as discussed by Singhal. Google shows the following example for “telescopes”:

It sure seems like there are a lot of ads “above the fold”. I thought Google didn’t care for that much.

“These new formats are clearly labeled ‘sponsored,’ and take space currently occupied by AdWords,” says Samat.

But it looks like there will be plenty fo AdWords ads on the page too.

Google is, however, also putting the “sponsored” results in the area where other queries will return Knowledge Graph results:

These types of search results have been described by Google recently as a “third kind of thing” between organic results and ads. Sullivan has made a point to referr to them as “paid inclusion” results, and to point out that this kind of thing was considered “evil” by Google back in the IPO days.

Things change (and Google doesn’t call it paid inclusion).

May 31, 2012
Google Alerts Searchers In China When Queries May Cause Problems

Google announced today that it will now notify users in mainland China when they enter a keyword that may cause connection issues. Such issues are occurring, according to Google, when users search for a particular subset of queries.

Google shared a video demonstrating what happens:

Google says it has not found any problems with its own systems.

“By prompting people to revise their queries, we hope to reduce these disruptions and improve our user experience from mainland China. Of course, if users want to press ahead with their original queries they can carry on,” explains Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Knowledge at Google. “In order to figure out which keywords are causing problems, a team of engineers in the U.S. reviewed the 350,000 most popular search queries in China. In their research, they looked at multiple signals to identify the disruptive queries, and from there they identified specific terms at the root of the issue.”

“We’ve observed that many of the terms triggering error messages are simple everyday Chinese characters, which can have different meanings in different contexts,” Eustace continues. “For example a search for the single character [江] (Jiāng, a common surname that also means “river”) causes a problem on its own, but 江 is also part of other common searches like [丽江] (Lijiang, the name of a city in Yunnan Province), [锦江之星] (the Jinjiang Star hotel chain), and [江苏移动] (Jiangsu Mobile, a mobile phone service). Likewise, searching for [周] (Zhōu, another common surname that also means “week”) triggers an error message, so including this character in other searches—like [周杰伦] (Jay Chou, the Taiwanese pop star), [周星驰] (Stephen Chow, a popular comedian from Hong Kong), or any publication that includes the word “week”—would also be problematic.”

Google will show a message to the user when they search for things it thinks might trigger the issues:

Google will still let the searcher try to search, or edit their search terms and try a different approach to the query.

Google.cn still redirects to Google Hong Kong, since Google pulled its search engine out of China a couple years ago.

May 31, 2012
Google Knowledge Graph Increasing Number Of Searches, Company Says

Earlier this month, Google announced Knowledge Graph, which it considers its way of providing results about “things” rather than “strings” or keywords.

Google has been speaking very highly of the feature, while also making sure people know it’s still a work in progress. Either way, it’s already increasing the number of searches people perform on Google, according to the company. The Wall Street Journal ran an article after interviewing Google’s Amit Singhal. Here’s a snippet:

“Early indications are that people are interacting with it more, learning about more things…and doing more [search] queries,” said Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, in an interview Friday. “It’s stoking people’s curiosity.”

On Tuesday Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds said the company’s internal data continues to show people are “doing more searches as a result” of the revamp, though he and Singhal declined to share specific figures.

Google ran a doodle on its homepage this week celebrating the birthday of Fabergé Egg creator Peter Carl Fabergé. Despite an extensive and well-sourced Wikipedia entry on the man, Google did not display “knowledge panels” for him in its search results. This shows that Google has a lot of expansion to do on the Knowledge Graph, and it’s interesting that they would highlight someone that they don’t have knowledge panels for with a clickable doodle, which takes you straight to Google’s search results for him.

If the Knowledge Graph continues to contribute to increased Google searches, that could do wonders for Google’s search market share, and ultimately mean a lot more AdWords impressions. It will be interesting to see how the market share trends as the Knowledge Graph expands, not only to cover more topics, but to include more data sources.

More Knowledge Graph coverage here.

May 31, 2012
Google+ Local Reveals Google’s Plan For Zagat

Google has announced that it’s rolling out Google+ Local, which it bills as “a simple way to discover and share local information”.

Google is finally revealing just what it’s going to do with it’s Zagat acquisition, as Google+ Local features Zagat scores, as well as recommendations from Google+ connections. “Since Zagat joined the Google family last fall, our teams have been working together to improve the way you find great local information,” says Director of Product Management, Avni Shah. “Zagat has offered high-quality reviews, based on user-written submissions and surveys, of tens of thousands of places for more than three decades. All of Zagat’s accurate scores and summaries are now highlighted on Google+ local pages. ”

Google+ Local is also integrated into search, Google Maps and mobile (Android…iOS is on the way). Inside Google+, it has its own tab. When you use that tab, you can search for specific places or browse non-specific ones. When you click on a place, you’ll go to a local Google+ page with photos, Zagat scores, summaries, reviews from friends and other info, like hours of operation, address, etc. Google will show you the same info if your’e using Search or Maps, it says.

Here’s what it looks like on Google+:

Maps:

Google+ Local on mobile:

“Each place you see in Google+ Local will now be scored using Zagat’s 30-point scale, which tells you all about the various aspects of a place so you can make the best decisions,” says Shah. “For example, a restaurant that has great food but not great decor might be 4 stars, but with Zagat you’d see a 26 in Food and an 8 in Decor, and know that it might not be the best place for date night.”

Users can share their opinions and photos of places, of course, which will help feed the personalization of your friends’ results.

Here are a few videos about Google+ Local:

For Businesses

Business owners will be able to continue managing their local listings the same way, using Google Places for Business. Businesses can still verify their basic listing data, make updates, and respond to reviews. If you use AdWords Express, Google says your ads will operate as normal, and will automatically redirect customers to the destination you selected, or your current listing.

Businesses will have to get used to a new layout and design for their listings.

“All your basic business information is still available,” notes Jen Fitzpatrick, VP Engineering. “And by streamlining the layout and putting more focus on photos and reviews, we hope to help you highlight what makes your business truly unique.”

“With these updates, we’re connecting the millions of people on Google+ to local businesses around the world,” adds Fitzpatrick. “With one listing, your business can now be found across Google search, maps, mobile and Google+, and your customers can easily recommend your business to their friends, or tell the world about it with a review.”

Google posted the following to its Google+ Your Business Page:

Google+ Your Business” width=”50″ />

Google+ Your Business 21 minutes ago Posted by +Vanessa Schneider

Manage a Google Places page? That listing just got a simpler, cleaner look with the introduction of Google+ Local, a new way to discover businesses across Google.

With Google+ Local, customers can now easily recommend your business to their friends, or tell the world about it with a review. We’ve added +Zagat reviews and updated our scoring system to their 30-point scale, allowing customers to better share what makes your business unique. Google+ Local is integrated into Search, Maps, mobile and as a new tab in Google+ (just look for “Local” along the left to get started). We are rolling out today, so if you don’t see it now, you’ll see it soon.

Read more about what this means for you as a business owner over on the Google and Your Business Blog (http://goo.gl/bVi9Q), or check out our quick guide to what’s new (http://goo.gl/p1dni).

Have feedback to share? Use the “Send feedback” link under the Google+ gear icon 52 11 Powered by socialditto

Google says this is just a first step, that we’ll see more updates in the upcoming months, and that it will soon make it easier to manage listings on Google and take full advantage of the social features of Google+ pages, such as Hangouts, and sharing photos/videos/posts.

Google has already given a handful of businesses access to such functionality. Check out The Meatball Shop for an example.

May 30, 2012
iAcquire Gets Rid Of Paid Link Offerings Following Google De-Indexing

Blogger Josh Davis recently put out an investigative report exposing the marketing firm iAcquire for engaging in paid links for clients. Once Google caught wind of it, iAcquire was de-indexed from Google’s search results.

Now, the company has openly admitted to “financial compensation,” though it says it has been transparent about this with its clients. On Tuesday, iAcquire put out a blog post talking about the ordeal. Here’s a snippet:

There are many methods to develop link relationships. Based on the client strategy we deploy a variety of approaches to link development, and in some cases we’ve allowed financial compensation as a tool. Removing financial compensation from the link development toolset has been a long term goal for us. We are using these recent events to be a catalyst to expedite those plans effective immediately.

We do not mislead customers nor operate in any manner contrary to their wishes or directives. Every strategy we develop is done in conjunction with knowledgeable online marketing specialists from iAcquire and our clients. Our process is transparent- every aspect of a campaign is available to our customers. In the past, we have responded to the frequent needs for urgency and speed from our clients. We are going to take this opportunity to discuss with our clients the best approaches to ensure a long term strategy and horizon for their program.

The company has been engaging in a lot of related conversation on Twitter:

Follow @JonahsteinJonah Stein @Jonahstein
@iacquire at least buy your brand on PPC while Google has you blacked out. Not that you want to see the results for brand queries ATM

Follow @iacquire iAcquire
@iacquire @jonahstein We’re not that concerned with being deindexed–we weren’t driving much traffic through search anyway. But thanks for the…
17 hours ago via HootSuite · powered by @socialditto
Reply · Retweet · Favorite

Follow @RightHatSEOTyson Stevens @RightHatSEO
Man…@iacquire getting rocked left and right. Who will be next? http://t.co/z4Zy19Mf #seo

Follow @iacquire iAcquire
@iacquire @righthatseo not exactly getting rocked, just nudging us in the right direction even quicker http://t.co/6RLQedRg
17 hours ago via HootSuite · powered by @socialditto
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Follow @JonahsteinJonah Stein @Jonahstein
@iacquire at least buy your brand on PPC while Google has you blacked out. Not that you want to see the results for brand queries ATM

Follow @iacquire iAcquire
@iacquire @jonahstein but of course we are working to comply with google in order to return to the search results
17 hours ago via HootSuite · powered by @socialditto
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Follow @CraigAddymanCraig Addyman @CraigAddyman
My Thoughts on @iacquire ̿̿ ̿̿’̿’\̵͇̿̿\з==(•̪●)==ε/̵͇̿̿/’̿’̿ ̿ ̿̿ http://t.co/jTsQvBCg via @craigaddyman

Follow @iacquire iAcquire
@iacquire @craigaddyman Can’t speak for everyone else but we haven’t stopped working hard to be the best SEOs we can right now
45 minutes ago via HootSuite · powered by @socialditto
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We may soon see other companies being exposed in similar fashion, as Davis recently told WebProNews, “I have come across some other smaller companies which seem to be doing it (maybe one other large one, but I am still researching that).”

Google penalties from paid links, as we’ve seen in the past, can have big effects on big companies. Overstock.com even blamed Google’s penalty for an “ugly year”.

Update: Davis now tells us, “I am not currently researching other companies large or small that may be buying undisclosed links. While my research for the initial piece did unearth what appeared to be other paid links, that was just a byproduct of my initial work. I have not further pursued examining any more links. It took so much time to do the ‘Search Secrets’ piece in thorough manner, I don’t intend to duplicate that amount of work again.”

May 30, 2012
Google Penguin Update Refresh & Recovery Provide Hope For Webmasters
As previously reported, Google announced its first Penguin update since the original over Memorial Day weekend. Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, tweeted about it, saying, “Minor weather report: We pushed 1st Penguin algo data refresh an hour ago. Affects <0.1% of English searches." Have you seen search referrals drop or rise since this update? Let us know in the comments.

The good news, whether you were hit by Penguin the first time or this time, is that you can recover. We’ve now seen that this can happen, and since we know that Google will continue to push data refreshes for Penguin, there should be plenty of chances to do so. Just think about all the Panda refreshes we’ve seen since February 2011.

We recently reported on WPMU, a seemingly quality site with plenty of fans on social media channels, which got hit by the first Penguin update. The site has now made a full recovery.

Here’s what the analytics looked like after Penguin:

Here’s what the analytics look like now:

It’s worth noting that Cutts was aware of this site, as James Farmer (the site’s owner) was able to get it brought to his attention, following the initial Penguin update, via an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. Cutts had provided some examples of the kinds of links that were likely hurting it. This was all discussed in our previous article, but to summarize, WPMU distributes WordPress themes, and a lot of blogs, including spam blogs were using some of them, which included links back to WPMU in the footer.

Ross Hudgens from Full Beaker provided some assistance and advice for Farmer, and blogged about the experience at SEOmoz. He notes that Farmer opted to ask blogs to remove the links, rather than applying nofollow to them, but it was actually an internal change that Farmer was able to make, which ultimately might have had the greatest impact on the recovery. Hudgens writes:

The most perilous piece of WPMU’s link profile came from one site – EDUblogs.org. EDU Blogs is a blogging service for people in the education space, allowing them to easily set up a subdomain blog on EDUblogs for their school-focused site – in a similar fashion to Blogspot, Typepad, or Tumblr, meaning that each subdomain is treated as a unique site in Google’s eyes. Coincidentally, this site is owned by WPMU and Farmer, and every blog on the service leverages WPMU theme packs. Each of these blogs had the “WordPress MU” anchor text in the footer, which meant a high volume of subdomains considered unique by Google all had sitewide “WordPress MU” anchor text. In what might have been a lucky moment for WPMU, this portion of their external link profile was still completely in their control because of WPMU ownership.

In what I believe is the most critical reason why WPMU made a large recovery and also did it faster than almost everyone else, Farmer instantly shut off almost 15,000 ‘iffy’ sitewide, footer LRDs to their profile, dramatically improving their anchor text ratios, sitewide link volume, and more. They were also able to do this early on in the month, quickly after the original update rolled out. A big difference between many people trying to “clean up their profile” and WPMU is time – getting everything down and adjusted properly meant that many people simply did not see recoveries at refresh 1.1 – but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen at all if the effort persists.

Farmer was also able to get one of the blogs that Cutts had initially pointed out the links from, to remove the links. According to Hudgens, he also did some other things, which may have played a role in the recovery, such as: implementing canonical URLs to clean up crawl errors and eliminate unnecessary links, fixed some broken sitemaps and submitted them to Webmaster Tools, fixed some duplicate title tag issues (which Webmaster Tools reported). He also submitted the site to the form Google provides for those who think they’ve wrongfully been impacted by Penguin. Twice.

It’s also possible that the exposure this site has received in the media, and in front of Matt Cutts could have helped. We’ve certainly seen penalties come from such exposure.

Not everyone will be able to get such exposure to make their cases as strong to Google, but Google does look at the submissions to that form, so if you’ve determined that you’re in compliance with Google’s quality guidelines, and you still think you were actually hit by Penguin, that’s a good place to start your recovery efforts, but you’ll probably want to continue to dig as much as you can.

Look at all of Google’s quality guidelines. Are there any areas where Google may think you’re in violation? Make the proper changes. Cutts recently pointed to the following videos as recovery advice:

He also said the following tips from Marc Ensign “looked solid”:

Create a blog and consistently build up your site into a wealth of valuable content.

Work with a PR firm or read a book and start writing legitimate press releases on a regular basis and post them on your site.

Visit blogs within your industry and leave valuable feedback in their comments section.

Link out to other valuable resources within your industry that would benefit your visitors.

Share everything you are creating on 2 or 3 of your favorite social media sites of choice.

Position yourself as an expert.

Virginia Nussey at Bruce Clay put together an interesting step-by-step guide to “link pruning” which might help you clean up your link profile, and ease your way to a recovery. She recommends setting up a spreadsheet with the following headers: Target URL, Source URL, Source Rank, Source Craw Date, Anchor Text, Image Link, ALT Text, Nofollow, Redirect and Frame. Then, she recommends adding the following to the spreadsheet, for webmaster contact info: Owner name, IP Address, Owner Address, Owner Email, Owner Phone Number, Registrar Name, Technical Content, Name Servers, Net Name, Created, Updated, Expires, Data Source (what site/registry was the resource for the contact gathered?).

From there, it’s just about sending removal requests and seeing what happens. Hopefully lawsuits aren’t part of your strategy.

We’ll have more discussion with Farmer to share soon, and perhaps he’ll be able to shed a bit more light on his own Penguin recovery. In the meantime, if you’re been hit, perhaps you can view his story as one of hope and inspiration, before you go starting over with a new site (which Google has also suggested as a possible option).

Penguin will be back again. You can recover. Remember, there are always other non-Penguin signals that you can try to improve upon too. You certainly don’t want to forget about our old pal the Panda.

Google called Penguin a success even before the latest refresh. What are your thoughts about it now that we’ve seen an update to the update? Let us know in the comments.
May 30, 2012
Peter Carl Fabergé Gets Google Doodle
Fabergé egg creator Peter Carl Fabergé is being honored today with a Google doodle. The man was born on this day in 1846.

He was a jeweler from Russia, whose company was commissioned by Tsar Alexander III, to create a jewel-encrusted Easter egg for the Empress Maria, his wife. From then on, he made more eggs over the years for the Tsar and the next Tsar, Nicholas II. That is, according to a well-cited Wikipedia entry.

Sources for that Wikipedia entry include:
- Twice Seven: The Autobiography of H C Bainbridge,
- Fabergé: Goldsmith and Jeweller to the Imperial Court – His Life and Work
- The History of the House of Fabergé according to the recollections of the senior master craftsman of the firm Franz P. Birbaum
- The Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs
- Peter Carl Fabergé – Goldsmith and Jeweller to the Russian Imperial Court – His Life and Work
- The Art of Carl Fabergé
- Geza von Habsburg’s Fabergé
- Masterpieces from the House of Fabergé
- Faberge’s Eggs: The Extraordinary Story of the Masterpieces That Outlived an Empire
- Faberge and the Russian Master Goldsmiths
- Carl Fabergé: Goldsmith to the Imperial Court of Russia
Interestingly enough, Google has no “knowledge panel” for Fabergé, despite this Wikipedia entry,

which has information aplenty. Google does still deem the Wikipedia entry the most relevant organic result for “Peter Carl Fabergé”.

Here’s what Google deems to be the most relevant video for a YouTube search for “Fabergé egg”:

In case the doodle has gotten you in the mood for some egg browsing, a Google image search for “Fabergé egg” makes for a very colorful experience:

Peter Carl Faberge's eggs on display in Google Image Search

It’s unlikely that today’s doodle will be as popular as some of Google’s other, more interactive doodles, such as last week’s Bob Moog doodle. Still, given Google’s penchant for easter eggs (as in fun, hidden items), and the nature of this particular doodle, I would not be surprised if some hidden gems were uncovered throughout the course of the day.

May 30, 2012

There has been a ton of speculation regarding Google’s Penguin update. Few know exactly what the update specifically does, and how it works with Google’s other signals exactly. Google always plays its hand close to its chest.

“While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics,” Google’s Matt Cutts said in the announcement of the update.

He also said, “The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.”

“We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings,” he said. To me, that indicates that this is about all webspam techniques – not just keyword stuffing and link schemes, but also everything in between.

So it’s about quality guidelines. Cutts was pretty clear about that, and that’s why we’ve been discussing some of the various things Google mentions specifically in those guidelines. So far, we’ve talked about:

Cloaking
Links
Hidden text and links
Keyword stuffing

Another thing on the quality guidelines list is: “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Of course, like the rest of the guidelines, this is nothing new, but in light of the Penguin update, it seems worth examining the guidelines again, if for no other reason than to provide reminders or educate those who are unfamiliar. Duplicate content seems like one of those that could get sites into trouble, even when they aren’t intentionally trying to spam Google. Even Google says in its help center article on the topic, “Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

“However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic,” Google says. “Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.”

Google lists the following as steps you can take to address any duplicate content issues you may have:

Use 301s: If you’ve restructured your site, use 301 redirects (“RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)

Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don’t link to http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page and http://www.example.com/page/index.htm.

Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We’re more likely to know that http://www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than http://www.example.com/de or http://de.example.com.

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

Use Webmaster Tools to tell us how you prefer your site to be indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, http://www.example.com or http://example.com).

Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details. In addition, you can use the Parameter Handling tool to specify how you would like Google to treat URL parameters.

Avoid publishing stubs: Users don’t like seeing “empty” pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. For example, don’t publish pages for which you don’t yet have real content. If you do create placeholder pages, use the noindex meta tag to block these pages from being indexed.

Understand your content management system: Make sure you’re familiar with how content is displayed on your web site. Blogs, forums, and related systems often show the same content in multiple formats. For example, a blog entry may appear on the home page of a blog, in an archive page, and in a page of other entries with the same label.

Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.

Don’t block Google from duplicate content. Google advises against this, because it won’t be able to detect when URLs point to the same content, and will have to treat them as separate pages. Use the canonical link element (rel=”canonical”).

Note: there are reasons why Google might skip your Canonical link elements.

It’s important to note that Google doesn’t consider duplicate content to be grounds for penalty, unless it appears that it was used in a deceptive way or to manipulate search results. However, that seems like one of those areas, where an algorithm might leave room for error.

Here are some videos with Matt Cutts (including a couple of WebProNews interviews) talking about duplicate content. You should watch them, if you are concerned that this might be affecting you: