SEO Training

You have probably heard that Google has launched a service called Google Plus to take on Facebook. (Good luck with that Google)

What you may not have heard is that they have very recently launched Google Plus Business Pages.  They are a lot like Facebook Fan pages but “Googled” and in my humble opinion for more business friendly.

Think of a Google Places listing, but with status updates.

Google have big plans for these new Google Plus pages including incorporating direct links to them in the Android mobile device operating system.

And there is a good chance that Google will use the existence and popularity of Google Plus pages as yet another ranking factor (citation), in the Google search rankings formula. In other words if you don’t have one, your Google search engine rankings may suffer.

You can see an example of our Google Plus business page here:  http://gplus.to/seobrisbane

To create your own Google Plus business page, simply visit http://www.google.com/+/business/

Note that you will need a Gmail account to create a Google Plus business page.

All you do is click the “Create your Google+ Page” link. Then click on the “Local business or Place” link and follow the instructions.

If you have a Google Places/Maps listing, most of the profile information you see there has been pulled from Google Places/Maps.

Like most social media sites, Google Plus also has it’s own search engine. Over time, I believe it will become popular with people looking for the latest deals and news for products and services in their local area.  You can see what I mean here:  https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/seo brisbane

Until next week,  thank you for reading. If you want to sign up for our free Friday SEO Tips, please complete the form at top right of this page.

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For more information about Google Plus pages, I can highly recommend:
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-set-up-a-google-page-for-your-business/trackback/

http://www.socialfish.org/2011/11/you-finally-have-a-google-plus-business-page-now-what.html

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-pages-connect-with-all-things.html

http://www.business2community.com/google-plus/how-to-create-google-plus-business-pages-089773

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Is duplicate content on your web site really an issue when it come to the Google rankings?

The short answer is “no”. But there are two caveats.

We have been running a little experiement the last few weeks to see if we could get to page one for the following search terms:

wordpress help brisbane
wordpress help sydney
wordpress help canberra
wordpress help melbourne

Rather than do what most people do, try to get one page to rank for multiple cities, what we did was come up with a standard template page for WordPress Help Brisbane then copy the page for the other cities and made some small changes that took a minute or so.

The key changes were:

a. Customise the title metatag for the particular city page
b. Customise the description tag and keywords for the particular city page
c. Change the page title (wrapped in H1 tags), for each city page

That was it. The rest of the pages are identical.

So what are the results after 2 weeks? Now remember these pages are very new.

wordpress help brisbane – 3rd
wordpress help sydney – 5th
wordpress help canberra – 4th
wordpress help melbourne – 3rd

Not a bad result for a few minutes work. Yes we did build some links into those pages with the correct anchor text. And that link-building will continue till we get them all to position 1 or 2.

The key point here is that if you change the metatags and page heading, you can get away with duplicating the rest of the page and still get decent rankings.

Here’s some more articles and resources about duplicate content:

http://wphacks.com/how-to-blocking-your-wordpress-categories-and-archives-from-google/
http://blog.cherouvim.com/duplicate-content-test-and-url-canonicalization/
http://www.webpagemistakes.ca/website-duplicate-content/
http://www.seoline-blog.de/ubersicht-google-penalties/
http://familybusinesstips.com/2011/05/what-is-google-1/
http://www.onlinemarketingexperts.com.au/2009/07/how-to-get-out-of-the-950-google-penalty/
http://www.techiecorner.com/1259/how-to-avoid-duplicate-content-using-htaccess/
http://www.seoline-blog.de/duplicate-content-unter-die-lupe-genommen/
http://www.article-rewriting-software.com/
http://money.bigbucksblogger.com/two-tips-to-avoid-duplicate-content-robotstxt-or-meta-robots-wordpress-plugin/