Websites with a lot of duplicate content get penalized by search engines. After all, their goal is to find unique content, not content that is the same throughout the internet, or even the same throughout your website. Many webmasters will unknowingly have a lot of duplicate content on their website, often because of simple technical mistakes. Here is how to avoid duplicate content.

Where Does Duplicate Content Come From?

Perhaps the most common source of duplicate content is from archive-type pages. For example, if you run a blog, the main content is in your posts. But you also have your category pages and your archive pages. Each of your category pages has a 200-word snippet from the article as a teaser for viewers to see.

Unfortunately, that means a single page of your category pages has as much as 1500 words of duplicate content, copied straight from your articles. The same is true of your archive pages. And any given blog may have dozens of pages of category and archive pages. Less common sources of duplicate content include hiring unscrupulous outsourcers who copy and paste other people’s work, along with webmasters who republish other people’s articles with the original author’s permission (legal, but not good from a search engine optimization [SEO] perspective.) So how do you prevent duplicate content?

Learn to Use Your Meta Robots or Robots.txt

Your meta robots tag allows you to specify on a certain page whether you want the page indexed or not. If your page contains duplicate content, just tell the search engines not to index it. Robots.txt resides on your top level directory and tells the search engines which pages it can and can’t index. Basically, meta works on a single page and robots.txt directs the whole site. Learn to use both if you often need to block search engines out of certain pages. Learning to use meta robots and robots.txt is especially important if you are using HTML or PHP to build your site, rather than WordPress.

Using WordPress Plug-Ins

If you are using WordPress, a lot of the duplicate content issues can be remedied through plug-ins. Most of the SEO plug-ins will handle the major duplicate content issues for you. Make sure you get one that allows you to “noindex” your category and archive pages, as well as automatically make all your links canonical.

Scan All Content with Copyscape

If you regularly outsource content, get in the habit of scanning your content with Copyscape. Copyscape will scan the internet for copies of your content and report back to you if they have found any matches, along with how close the match was. Though you will seldom run into an issue with outsourcers copying content outright, if it does happen it could ruin your entire website; therefore, it doesn’t hurt to be careful.

Duplicate content is preventable. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to noindex the right pages and scan your content with Copyscape. Get in the habit of performing these two procedures and you will protect your rankings in the long run.

Page caching is a technique of speeding up your load times. In addition, it will reduce the processing load on your server, as well as help with your search engine rankings. Below are the different kinds of caching and how you can apply this technique to your blog or website:

Caching and Types of Caching

Caching is the act of taking repetitive PHP code and turning it into HTML so that it doesn’t have to be run through the server every time to display the same kind of page. Let’s say you run a website that uses PHP code to determine what your viewer’s IP address is and then show that back to them.

Every time someone loads your web page, the page would first determine the viewer’s PHP, turn it into HTML code, and then display that code to the user. If you cach the page the first time around, however, it will simply save that HTML so that it doesn’t have to execute the PHP command again the second time around.

In more complex web apps, as well as WordPress blogs which run on a lot of complex PHP, the speed difference and server load difference between cached and non-cached pages can be very significant.

There are three main types of caching:

1. Output caching – This is where the entire page is cached and turned from PHP to HTML.

2. Fragment caching – This is where only a portion of the page is cached. Generally this technique is used by more tech-savvy designers who want to cache just specific processing-intensive parts of a website.

3. Data caching – This is where certain data, such as comments, are cached instead of pulling it from the server every time the page is visited.

Caching Tools and Applications

If you are running a WordPress blog, you will have a lot of tools available to you for caching and speeding up your pages. Two of the most popular plug-ins are WP Super Cache and Quick Cache.

WP Super Cache is a plug-in that will take the majority of your dynamic pages and turn them into static HTML pages. It will then bypass your PHP server completely and just serve up HTML whenever it can. Although users probably won’t notice a difference right away, it can make a huge difference during peak times or if you are on a shared server.

Quick Cache is similar to WP Super Cache. Quick Cache has a complex “decision engine” (computer brain) that decides when it should and shouldn’t serve up a cached page. Anytime someone needs up-to-date data, Quick Cache will know and serve up PHP. On the other hand, anytime someone just needs a normal page, it will display the page from the cache instead.

Setting up caching on a non-WordPress website requires a decent level of PHP proficiency. Perhaps the easiest tool to set up caching on a non-WordPress platform is the Alternative PHP Cache (APC). APC is a code framework that allows developers to specify which part(s) of their website they want to cache and write their own caching code.

You now know what caching is, along with a few popular tools for setting up caching on your own website. If you are using a processing-heavy website set-up that often outputs static pages, then you could speed up your website a lot by using caching.

In the long run, affiliate link theft can cost you a lot of money if you are not careful. Link theft can be intentional or accidental, and can be done by other affiliates, customers or in rare cases the vendors themselves.

How Affiliate Link Theft Works: Simple and Advanced Methods

Link theft can be defined as any time someone strips out your affiliate link and replaces it with theirs. The simplest and most common practice is people who sign up directly for the affiliate program, strip out your link and replace it with theirs to get a “discount.” For example, if you are selling a $40 product on ClickBank with a 75 percent commission, the buyer would just replace your link with theirs and pay just $10 for the product.

There are, of course, more mischievous schemes as well. One technique used by other affiliates and unscrupulous publishers is to hide affiliate link codes in a 1×1 iframe. Because credit for affiliate links is usually given to the affiliate who sent the traffic last, that means that if they can get someone to view a page with their 1×1 iframe code on it after you send them traffic, they will get the credit. For example, if a webmaster has an email list, all they need to do is get the customer’s email list, have them read a content page with their affiliate link embedded in it, and they will instantly overwrite your affiliate code.

Now that you know what link theft is, how can you prevent it?

Preventing Affiliate Link Theft

The most basic way of protecting yourself against link theft is to cloak your links. Many merchants will allow you to do this right on their system. If you want, you can also cloak your links yourself. There are a number of free programs on the Internet that will allow you to do this. You can also buy a domain and do a domain-level redirect without showing the destination URL. Unfortunately, anyone seeing the product can still go to the affiliate network to find the product. For example, this person could go to ClickBank, search for the name of the product and find it that way, even if the link is cloaked.

The most drastic way to prevent affiliate theft is to go all the way and write your own sales letter, with different product names and headlines. Then just embed the “buy now” button code in your own website, cloaked. This technique will just about prevent 99 percent of affiliate link fraud.

With the iframing issue, unfortunately, if you are a small publisher, there is little recourse. The one way you can track this kind of link theft is by asking the publisher to place your own tracking pixel on their “Thank You” page. If you are sending more than $500 a month in traffic, they will usually be happy to do this, unless, of course, the thief is the publisher and not another affiliate.

These are a few of the most common ways links are stolen and how to protect against them. Again, link theft can cost you a lot of money over time. Use these techniques to make sure you get paid for your work.

When done correctly, podcasting can be an effective way to build an audience. When done poorly, you can turn off your listeners very quickly. Many of the mistakes that podcasters make are relatively simple to spot and correct. Here are a few of the most common podcasting mistakes, along with tips for avoiding them.

Microphone and Positioning

You don’t need studio quality for your podcast, but if your listeners would need to strain to understand your speech, then you need to buy a real microphone. Any microphone that came with a computer isn’t going to be of sufficient quality; the same goes for your iPhone microphone and any microphone that came with a cheap headset.

Also, make sure you are positioned correctly. If you are speaking too close to the microphone, it will pick up spitting sounds and the sounds of your lips opening and closing; too far and your voice will sound muffled. Use the levels gauge to see whether you are too close or too far. Position the microphone slightly to the side rather than right in front to avoid popping sounds.

Long-Winded Introductions

Podcasters who don’t get to the point within the first three minutes are going to lose audience. Don’t spend too much time introducing yourself, your topic, selling the audience, etc. Your audience knows who you are and is there to hear the content. Don’t keep them waiting.

Unscripted Podcasts

Recording a podcast completely off the cuff just doesn’t work. Having a script can really help smooth out your presentation. A “script” in this case is just a list of topics and main points in those topics. Never script out an entire conversation, as your audience will easily pick up rehearsed content. Instead, by having a list of main points ready, you will be able to create a smoothly flowing conversation without ever stumbling on what to say.

Monotone

Having a monotonous podcast is another guaranteed way to chase away your listener base. For one, doing a podcast solo is much harder than doing one with a co-host. A co-host provides another voice and another perspective, which is much more entertaining to the listener than just one voice. If you insist on doing a solo podcast, however, make sure to modulate your voice. Take on different emotions, different stances and different personalities to keep your audience engaged.

These are a few of the most common mistakes podcasters make. Make sure you have good sound by buying and properly using a good microphone. Get to the point quickly. Have a detailed outline of each podcast before you start. Finally, keep your audience engaged with different voices, opinions and emotions.

Podcasting, when done for the right audience, can create a powerful two-way bond between host and listener. Unfortunately, podcasting isn’t for every website. Read on to learn more about which websites are most suited for podcasting.

Start with an Audience

Podcasting as a marketing tool is a bit of a misconception. Podcasting is just not great for generating new traffic, especially in the beginning. On the other hand, podcasting is a very effective way of delivering new, regular content to a loyal base of listeners. If you already have a bit of an audience and want to strengthen your bond with them, then podcasting is a great way to go about it. If you are trying to build a new audience from scratch, then you might want to approach it from another angle.

Are They Tech Savvy?

In order for someone to subscribe to your podcast, they first have to know what a podcast actually is, as well as how to subscribe to and download a podcast. It might seem simple to you, but that is actually beyond the technical knowledge of a lot of people. If you’re creating a podcast on the best way to plan for retirement after fifty, you probably shouldn’t use a podcast.

How Much Time Can You Afford?

Podcasting takes a lot of time. First, you have to plan out the podcast. Then you have to record the podcast, which could involve multiple takes and/or coordinating with a co-host. Then you have to edit the podcast, which takes at least twice as long as the actual podcast itself. Finally, you need to upload the podcast, make sure everything went up properly, and then promote the podcast.

Before you start a podcast, realize that it is a long-term time commitment. Assume that you will need to spend at least five hours a week for the next year to keep your podcast up and running smoothly. If and only if you are willing to make that commitment should you start a new podcast.

Blogs Work Best

Podcasts work best on RSS feeds. While it is possible to run a non-blog website and still use a podcast, it becomes a lot more unwieldy. If you run a blog, all you need to do is post a link to your podcast on your blog and the RSS feed will pick up. It will then proceed to send the podcast to all your subscribers. On the other hand, with a non-blog site, you will have to create a separate blog just so you can create an RSS feed.

These are a few considerations before starting your podcast. First determine if it is right for your audience based on existing traffic and whether they are tech savvy, then figure out if it is right for you based on time commitments.