Why You Suck At Onpage SEO

[Initial Effort]

This seems to be a major issue for most people. Please note this tutorial was made on 4-10 and some of the examples may change in the future if the webmaster updates his or her website.


Most people know how to navigate through the Title and Meta tags, how to create properly optimized content and navigation that flows. What most people do not understand is proper indexation and duplication/similar/overlapping content.


What I say duplicate content I am referring to exact copies of the same page on the same website. You can also have offpage duplicate content caused by people stealing your content or you stealing theirs.


When I say similar content, I am referring to having two articles like "How to make money online" and "Making Money Online".


When I say overlapping content, I am referring to having partially duplicate content appear on the page. The best example is an except.


Now a certain amount if duplicate/similar/overlapping content appears to be tolerate. It because a problem when there is an abundance of them and this will make your site rank lower. Having several of these low quality pages will hurt you.


I randomly searched for the term make money online and found this EMD. I have no idea who owns this website, so they will serve as an example: http://makemoneyonline.biz/ They currently rank about #45.


Now this website is going to have a difficult time climbing on to page 1 in my opinion. Here are several reasons why.


If you visit Google.com and do site:makemoneyonline.biz you will start to notice a few problems.


1. This tag page is serving up overlapping content. This person has it in the form of an except, but many tag pages will display the full article.


http://makemoneyonline.biz/tag/twitter/


You will also notice the two pages have somewhat similar ideas for their content.


http://makemoneyonline.biz/blogging/using-twitter-to-attract-readers-to-your-blog/
http://makemoneyonline.biz/blogging/attract-followers-on-twitter/


2. I wouldn't consider these tag pages high quality pages and this could also be hurting the website.


http://makemoneyonline.biz/tag/nofollow/
http://makemoneyonline.biz/tag/exact-match/


3. Also notice on many of the article pages there are two ads above the fold. Google Adsense messages will tell you to put 3 or more ads on the website because you're missing out on potential revenue. What they didn't tell you is too many ads seems to decrease your onpage SEO score. In general one ad above the fold is fine and then a second one is fine lower as long as you have 500-1000 words on the page.


http://makemoneyonline.biz/seo/nofollow/


4. Here is an example of overlapping content created by two tag pages with the same excerpt.


http://makemoneyonline.biz/tag/create/
http://makemoneyonline.biz/tag/directory/


5. Here is an example of an empty page created by the archives.


http://makemoneyonline.biz/archives/


6. Category and Tag Pages with some overlapping content. Google could easily be confused about which page should rank about SEO.


http://makemoneyonline.biz/seo/
http://makemoneyonline.biz/tag/seo/


7. Blog Post Pages creating overlapping content with tag pages.


http://makemoneyonline.biz/seo/page/6/
http://makemoneyonline.biz/seo/page/7/


8. Duplicate Tag Page with a page 2


http://makemoneyonline.biz/tag/blogging-2/page/2/
http://makemoneyonline.biz/tag/affiliate-2/page/2/


9. Author Page creating overlapping content.


http://makemoneyonline.biz/author/mmobiz/


So how can this problem be solved? In general, use your Wordpress SEO plugin and noindex, nofollow category/tag/author pages unless you really know what you are doing. I see this problem every day and people blame it on link building. What actually happens is since Panda 1.0 Google has been holding sites in cue. Then when they release an update they penalize all of these sites for onpage SEO. Another common thing I see is someone builds links and then they drop. This is because the Googlebot is coming back to the website and evaluating the website again and then notices all of the poblems.

 

[Initial Effort]

 

[iban177]

great post yes, but by using wordpress, many of these problems can be solved by using some SEO plugins.
thanks for effort though

 

[Initial Effort]

Another problem I've noticed is that even people that are using WP SEO plugins often have the plugin configured incorrectly.

 

[tedchang8592]

great help me a lot with yoast plugin setting, thanks

 

[logicmethod]

i though about this myself and have seen some high in serps when they do some backlink work

 

[daveguy]

Good post. Spoken like a true pro. Well done.

Print-friendly versions of pages often create duplicate content as well. Make sure to use rel=rel=canonical to specify the version you want search engines to rank

 

[twilightofidols]

Yes I always nofollow noindex non-content pages, with the exception of privacy policy/contact/and terms. This is good practice.

 

[AR!ZONA]

I'm glad I searched...
I suck at onpage, I know I have 3 identical pages. I did that when building the site so I could have the page titles/links available when I put the content there at a later date. I wonder how much this affects my rank?

My site is fluid html, and I want to rank the home page for my kw, but a different one shows up in search. I know this is due to more content in the page that is ranking, but I'm finding it hard to fit more content into my homepage. Can I stuff content into image alt tags?

Also, is that your recommendation for yoast settings in the second post?

 

[s4nt0s]

Another problem I've noticed is that even people that are using WP SEO plugins often have the plugin configured incorrectly.

Awesome post man. What do you think would be the best course of action to take if we do have a bunch of those tag pages already indexed in G? Say for example our site is on bottom of page one or on page 2, etc. and we have a good amount of the tag pages already indexed in G with our regular pages. Do you think it would be good to change them to noindex or since G has already seen and indexed them to just leave them?

This is one of my pet peeves with clickbump theme that I get with all of my Adsense sites. It seems to automatically create all these tag pages which to me, looks like dup content. There might be a setting in there to noindex these pages, I'll have to take a look.

Thanks for the post, I think its definitely something worth looking into.

 

[jlei523]

To author,

So you're saying that Google isn't smart enough to distinguish between a tag page and a content page? You're saying that because multiple tag pages have the same links to the same articles, that Google gets confused?

Are you saying that we should remove tag pages from being indexed?

 

[Kris88]

This should all seriously be checked?

 

[timepassblog]

Nice...thanks a lot...

 

[GutierresSEO]

great post yes, but by using wordpress, many of these problems can be solved by using some SEO plugins.
thanks for effort though

But let's say you're using Dreamweaver, there are no SEO plugins, right? One has to be careful and always take into consideration the things Innitial Effort said.

 

[0_00_0]

This should all seriously be checked?

My question exactly. Any inputs? I notice my tag archives sometimes rank I didn't want to lose out on that potential traffic then I simply forgot about it. Will I see a benefit to my other pages if these author/tag/date based archives are nofollowed? By the way - great post I haven't thought about this for a long time.

 

[FireTheWild]

I made some changes and let see the results.

Very useful thread. Thanks.