One of the easiest (and annoying) things a website owner can do is copy content from your website and place it into their own without permission and not crediting you as the original author.

Search engines aim to deliver unique information to their users and do not want duplicate information showing in their results, they do not penalise websites for duplicate content, but they do choose which version of the content to index and rank, therefore, this can be a problem for the owner of the original content of search engines choose the wrong version.

Websites that display content taken from various other sites are called “Scraper sites”. Scraper sites are the most worrisome concern’s to webmasters when it comes to search engines handling duplicate content.

Lucky for us, Google offers some potential solutions to prevent scraper sites getting the credit for our content as well as those who duplicate content on their own sites.

There are times on your own website where you could have multiple URL’s pointing to the same content, a way to tell Google which version to use is by specifying the URL you would like search engine spiders to use. This can be done in Google Sitemaps. Nothing is guaranteed, but you might get lucky and the bots will take note of your requirement.

Another suggestion is to Authenticate ownership of your content. Unfortunately, although a good idea, it may not be the best solution, as most poeple who take your content are not interested in authentication.

There was a myth going around that search engines check creation dates of content to determine which version to use, however, Vanessa Fox of Google shot that one to peices when she said “creation dates aren’t always reliable”, so I guess we can’t rely on that.

Other ways of dealing with scraper sites taking your content could be by contacting the scraper webmaster and threatening legal action for breach of copyright (If your content is copywrited), sometimes this can bring positive results and the webmaster will remove your content.

The truth is, there is currently no magic formular that deals with duplicate content issues, however, search engines such as Google are talking to webmasters and interested in peoples ideas to find way’s to deal with these issues. It may take some time, but at least they are moving in the right direction.

How well your website ranks in Google’s search engine depends on many different factors, such as:

• How competitive is the term you are targeting
• How old is your website
• How many links do you have in comparison to your competitors
• How large is your website
• How well optimised is it
• How well is it structured

The list can go on.

If you new to Search engine optimisation and a bit unsure how to go about getting your site listed in the search engine’s (Google inparticular) Google have provided basic guidelines to help you.

Of course, Google are not going to give too much away, all the guidelines do is tell you how Google want you to structure your site in a way that suits them, and in return, they say your website will at least be indexed in their search engine, and will rank. There are never any guarantee’s about the position your website ranks, but it will at least rank somewhere.

So, here are a few do’s and dont’s for you to consider when trying to get your website indexed and ranking in Google.

Design and Content

• You should try to make every page reachable from at least one static text link
• Include a Sitemap
• Create useful unique content
• Use keyphrases on your site that people are searching for relating to your products
• Use text instead of images as spiders to not understand the text in images (I’m not actually convinced of this one as they also suggest to make use of ALT text in images which spiders DO understand as far as I’m aware)
• Check for broken links
• If you use dynamic URLS such as www.domain.com?1234 be aware that not all search engines spider these URLS
• Try to not add more than 100 links to an individual page

Basic “Quality” Priniciples

• Create a site for users not for search engines
• Don’t trick the spiders by using unethical tactics
• Don’t submit to link farms

Specific “Quality” guidelines

• Don’t use hidden text
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky directs
• Don’t spam pages with your keywords
• Don’t create lots of websites with the same content
• Don’t use pages to install viruses, trojans or other badware/spamware
• If your site is an affiliate, ensure your content is unique and add’s value

So there we have it. This is how Google would like you to design and conduct your website. This of course it their guidelines, you website is your own and what you choose to do with it is your business, but if you want to give it a chance to rank in Google and not be pulled up for anything Google doesn’t like, then this is at least a good guideline to go by.

Black hat is a common term known to search engine optimisers, it is considered as using unethical techniques that work to get websites increased exposure in search engines.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN wants to ensure they are showing relevant results to their end users. For those who employ successful “Black hat” or “Unethical” techniques to get their sites to show up in the search results pages, more often than not, will not give you the information you were looking for.

For example, if a Webmaster wants to make money with Google Adsense, they place content on a webpage in the hope that when someone finds that page, they will click on an Ad because the content on the page is not useful. In return, the Webmaster gets paid for that click.

The result is poor user experience because of the black hat SEO techniques used by the Webmaster to fool the search engines into believing the page was relevant to the search.

This is exactly what search engines are trying to combat.

If you are a person who is hoping to outsource search engine marketing, then it is important you know what to look out for and avoid when trusting someone with your website.

Here are some common Black hat techniques:

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing can be achieved in a number of ways. It is an unethical technique of using tags such as Meta-tags, Alt tags and title tags to stuff with your target keywords. Search engines reads these tags and can help to indicate what a page is about, however, if you stuff your tags with keywords, and the search engines find out, then this can cause your site to be banned.

An example of keyword stuffing in alt tags (tags attached to images) could look something like:

[img src=”images/my_cat.jpg” alt=”black hat, dodgy practices, black, hat, spam, unethical,hat black,black hat is cool,im spamming for black hat,practice black hat”]

As you can see, the webmaster is wanting the search engines robots to notice the keyword black hat in the hope it will get a better ranking in the results pages, however, this is unethical and something which if picked up, is likely to get the website thrown out of the search engines.

Hidden Text

The most common way to hide text on a webpage is by setting the font colour of the text to be the same as the page background, this way it is not easily picked up by a site visitor.

People use hidden text to load keywords and phrases into a webpage that is only read by search engines to increase their rankings in search engines. However, this tactic goes against search engine guidelines and if picked up, can get your website banned.

One way to discover if a site has hidden text is to click Edit/Select all in your browser, if you see text, which is otherwise not visible, then this is hidden text.

Doorway Pages

A common example of a doorway page is for a Webmaster to create a page specifically for search engines, which probably would make no sense to a user. They will get the page for search engines ranking, and when a user clicks on the result from a search, they will immediately be redirected to a different page without their knowledge.

One way to discover a doorway page is to look at the description in a search result and to look for that content when you click through to that page. If the content is not within the page content or in the description Meta-tag, then it is likely the result you saw was a doorway page.

*Note: Google can sometimes use descriptions in their webpage results from DMOZ, check to see if the site is listed in DMOZ and check the description to clarify the description is not from them.

These are the most common techniques used by Black hat Webmasters

All of these methods can get your site banned from the search engines, so when outsourcing SEO work, check over your website to ensure none of these tactics are being used on your website.