duplicate content

I am a bit concerned my site may be penalized for duplicate content as my product pages are identical only the information dragged from the database differs can you advise please. also any help on optimizing my home page would be appreciated.
http://www.sensuallady.co.uk

contains moderate adult content.

Thanks

Pat

you're at no risk of being penalized for having duplicate content.
but there's much that could be done to optimize your website.

I have to run, but read this post and get a little feel for what I'm going to say when I have some time...

How bizzare! I was reading that post earlier, if I go to google analytics it mentions "/" as my index page and also www.sensuallady.co.uk I am hoping this is not a problem.
Also is it correct you should only have 1 H1 heading on your page.

thanks for your time

Pat

Ideally, these are the most important things to get right, from day one:
- Unique title on every page
- One single unique H1 on every page, perfectly or closely matching the page title
- One or Two H2s, acting as a sort of 'sub-title' for the page.
- Keyword rich URLs, if possible matching your title and H1
- Keyword rich link texts, if possible matching your title and H1 (on the target page)

Your biggest problem (and easiest to solve) is that the links to your homepage point to http://www.sensuallady.co.uk/index.html, which is different from, but has the same content as http://www.sensuallady.co.uk/.

Gotta shoot... More later... LOL

So Diego, as long as all links to the index pointed to '/' would everything be ok or would it necessary to set up a permanent redirect to stop people accessing it from variations of the address. If so how do you do this? Is it simple? Tutorial anywhere?

Thanks,

Pete.

Cheers
I will work on that now and let you know how I get on.

Pat

Pete, this is how I did my 301 redirect...

Code: Select all

RewriteEngine On

#301 redirect to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^1840dsgn.co.uk
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.1840dsgn.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Obviously change the URL's to your own!

Just a question, I won't be carrying it out...but say I was to stumble upon a domain name like web-design-uk.com and bought it. would it help seo if I set up a redirect from web-design-uk.com to 1840dsgn.co.uk? Just something i was thinking about...

Sorry, forgive me for being dim, but where does that go?

Pete.

in your .htaccess file, sorry should have explained that!

you make a text file and name it .htaccess, no extension.

put the code in there. this is also how you rewrite urls to get rid of nasty looking php?id= bits and stuff like that!

the .htaccess goes in your root folder, you might already have one. check on your remote server first, if not create one.

mike

I've justed talked about this in another thread. Read this post...
Redirecting from a keyword rich domain has no benefits what-so-ever.
When you do a 301 redirect, SEs drop the redirected domain from their indexes and replace it with the new domain. so your keyword-rich domain is completely ignored.
Keyword density is only considered on:
- the content of the websites that link to you
- the content of pages that link to you
- the content of your pages
- the content of your website

Repeating myself from the other post so this one makes sense...
This would only actually make any difference if you build your website under the keyword rich domain, like I've done with 123cleaners.com (actually london-dry-cleaners.com). This is good for marketing because it lets you build the website on a keyword -rich domain and advertise a human-friendly domain. But in SEO, the most important things are your content and the urls within the webiste, not the domain itself.

* I forgot something... *

On the issue of /index.{ext} and / duplicate content, you must correct your links so they never point to /index.{ext}. But you can't stop other people linking to /index.html. And in that case, I haven't yet been able to create a redirect in ASP (perhaps it can be done in PHP).

The problem is, when the website is on /, the ASP script engine reports that the URL of the page is /index.{ext}, ie.: the path of the page being displayed, not the URL used to access it.

So I can't redirect to / because it would go on forever...
Like I said, maybe this can be done in PHP and I wouldn't mind knowing...

Hi Diego

I have done some work on my site, trying to follow your suggestions, if you have got time could you take a look and give me some more feedback.
Thanks in advance.

Pat www.sensuallady.co.uk
contains moderate adult content

Hey, altho I am new to the forum and I am also new to SEO, I have found that for it to really take any effect within the google search engine you will have to wait between 3 - 6 months to see its full extent.

Repeating/Duplicating the keyword(s) through out your pages will not help you at all as google crawls the page like a person and expects to see the keyword only in its natural content where it is required.

The URL string is important http://www.keyword.co.uk/keyword/
Heading tags not just <h1>
Links on the page with the keyword
Links to and from your page to Google Page Rank sites above 7
Image names and alt/title tags
Meta Tags
Bold/Italic words

Javascript menus affect the crawling of pages as well, it seems that it does crawl past the script, it is best to have the javascript in a extrenal file.

There are probably many more factors that affect the keyword page rank as well but these are the ones that I have found to be most useful.

Wayne

It's much better on the surface, but there is still a lot of things you can do.
Firstly, I'll look at the leather lingerie page. (The problems below are on every page)

1. URL would be better as /leather-lingerie.html or /leather+lingerie
2. Your heading structure is good, but your H1 is full of useless code, an image (which shouldn't be there) and the hidden text could get you in a lot of trouble. Instead of...

Code: Select all

<h1 align="center"><span class="nodisplay">leather lingerie</span><img width="364" height="87" src="images/sensual.gif" alt="Sensual Lady Lingerie collection"/></h1>

...try the following technique:

Code: Select all

<h1>leather lingerie</h1>

...and add this css (on your stylesheet)...

Code: Select all

h1{ height:87px; width:100%; background:url(images/sensual.gif)  center center no-repeat; display:block; text-indent:-9999px; float:left; clear:both; }

text-indent:-9999px; slides the text out of view
the rest of the CSS puts the logo in the background.

Now I'll take a look around the whole website...
3. http://www.sensuallady.co.uk/showitem.php?item_id=84 would be a lot better as http://www.sensuallady.co.uk/Leather+Fishnet Lingerie+3+Piece+Set-84.html
and you can achieve that by using a .htaccess file.
Something like this... (not tested, but should work)

Code: Select all

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On 
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*)-([0-9]+)\.html$ showitem.php?item_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}

4. It looks like you're using a WYSIWYG editor to create your pages. If so, stop now! You'll save yourself time fixing problems later on.
There are so many <font> tags all over the place, which do nothing but diminish the importance of your keywords...

5. It seems to me most of your products evolve around the word 'sexy' (sexy stockings, sexy dresses, etc). If that's the case, it might be better to target phrases such as 'sexy leather lingerie' instead of 'leather lingerie' (more competition). You'll also benefit from the fact that 'sexy' will be a prominent word through the entire website so you're more likely to be found in searches with the word 'sexy' (which is relevant and a big enough slice of the cake...)

5. You have 2 description meta tags and no keywords meta tag on many pages.

***

I know it sounds like a lot but don't give up. All the work you do now will only pay off in the future (and you only have to do it once).

***
Finally, here's a list I put together last week of my 'one phrase strategy' (stupid name but it explains it well). It might help you as you go along...

If I had to optimise a page for “car sales” I build a page where…

• URL is SE friendly version of the phrase (site.com/car+sales/)
• Title is the phrase (<title>car sales</title>)
• Phrase is at the start of description meta tag
• Phrase is at the start of keywords meta tag
• H1 is the phrase - matches title (<h1>car sales</h1>)
• H2 is variation of or contains the phrase (<h2>cars on sale</h2>, <h2>cheap car sale</h2>, <h2>online car sale</h2>)
• When possible, all links to the page use the key-phrase (<a...>car sales</a>)
• At least 3 <strong>/<em> occurrence of phrase within paragraph text <strong>car sales</strong> and <em>car sales</em>) – whilst also making sure there aren’t many other strong/em tags using other phrases which would reduce the density of our key-phrase.
• The key-phrase appears in 1 of the first 2 and 1 of the last 2 paragraphs of the document. When you write a document about something, you usually mention it in the introduction and the conclusion. This technique enforces the importance of the key-phrase within the page content.
• There's at least one image using the phrase in its source and alt text (<img src="/img/car+sales.jpg" alt="car sales"/>)
• The page links to itself with the title of the page – this means you have at least one link within the page that uses that exact phrase, and you have at least one link with that phrase that links to the page. Two birds, one stone.

many thanks Wayne, Diego.
I guess I struggle on until I get it right.

Thanks

Pat

That's it. Don't give up. I've spent countless hours, many sleepless nights and drunk an absurd amount of coffee to get where I am now. SEO is tiring, but it's what will put you ahead of your competition and you'll reap the benefits for a long time to come...

Hi Diego
Done quite a bit of work, but as for the rewrite(re-direct) bit I am stuck. I followed your advice but apparently I am hosted on a windows server and the .htaccess file returns a 500 error and does not allow any of my website to be seen, is there a way around this.

Many thanks

Pat

Contact your host and ask if they can switch you onto a Linux server - mod rewrite only works on Linux servers. I had the same problem but my host just switched me over - took less than 24hours.

I think there are ways of doing it in PHP but mod rewrite is the easiest and proper way I believe,

Mike

Hi Mike

Thanks for that. I know they have linux servers but I am sure in the past I switched to a linux server only to find that some of my PHP code wouldnt function correctly, but I will check if that is still the case.

Cheers

Pat

the code is much, MUCH better... well done...
On the URL rewrite issue, the options are:
A) as Mike suggested, switch to linux and use .htaccess (if your site is written in PHP

B) use a custom error handling file that will fetch the response according to the url of the missing page.

C) I'm almost finished creating an ASP parser for .htaccess files which allows basic rewrite rules to be used in windows. You're free to use it if your server supports both php/asp.