BoostRanks SEO Tips

One way to strengthen the community in your niche is to start a planet. A planet is an aggregation of blogs with a web page and a feed.

The idea of a planet is to join and build a community around a niche. This just happens to have SEO benefits, too.

All the bloggers who belong to the planet selflessly chip in with links and articles (the same articles as on their blog, or a subset), and the planet pays back with links and interest. The more successful the planet gets, the more it pays back to it’s bloggers, which in turn feeds back to the planet.

It’s somewhat similar to twitter, but with full blog articles, instead of short notes. What you send to the planet, subscribers of the planet receive, and if they are also a blog member of the planet, they can reply with their own blog post.

The result is a stronger community, a community others can join in or watch from a distance.
A community who gets to know each other quicker, and help each other in their niche.

It’s a common convention to call the planet, planet *niche* (where *niche* is the topic of the niche) and the domain is planet.niche.com (replace niche.com with it’s own domain name)

Leave a comment or a message if you’d like to know more, or help with setting one up. Indeed, if you have an SEO related blog and want to join a planet, drop us a line.

The more high quality sites that link you, the more authority you’ll get. The higher up in the search results you’ll be, and the more traffic you’ll get from search engines. When you’re first starting out, it’s not always easy to get links. There’s a few places that allow you to link to yourself, though.

There’s a number of social bookmark sites out there, probably the most popular being del.icio.us. Sign up for an account, and bookmark posts as you publish them with a few choice tags.

Then there’s digg, but be careful, only digg your own work occasionally, and only your highest quality, or most interesting stuff. Digg has a culture and doesn’t suffer outsiders spamming them well. Diggers are cynical of pages with advertising on them, for example. You might want to turn ads off a page when you first digg, and if it builds momentum, you can always turn them on again later.

Stumble upon can get you a few visiters, same rules apply to digg.

Traffic from delicious and search engines finds your site based on text, get the right words in the right order on your page, and you’ll get some traffic. For success on digg and stumble upon, you’ll need more of an angle. A pretty page, an interesting story, humor and a reputation doesn’t hurt. Experiment, but don’t try and force your way in. Participate from the sideline, occasionally having a go in the middle yourself.

There’s a lot of talk about duplicate content, people go to great lengths to try and stop search engines indexing duplicate content. But just how bad is it?

Well, it depends. There’s different types of duplicate content. For example, you could have a site.com and a site.net, personally I would redirect .net to .com, but if not, the search engines are smart enough to know they are the same site. They will direct traffic to the site with the most incoming links. Still, it’s preferable to redirect.

Another cause for duplicate content is having the same content on www.site.com and site.com. Again, you won’t get punished for this, search engines will pick one url as the main site and direct traffic to it. In the case of google, you can even tell it what the main url is. It’s still preferable to redirect one url to the other. I like plain site.com, I think prefixing the url with www is dated. I set it up so www.site.com redirects to site.com.

Yet another cause for duplicate content is having a url like site.com/page/ where the same content will also be on site.com/page/index.html. I personally prefer urls like site.com/page/ and as long as your site doesn’t link to site.com/page/index.html, all incoming links should point to site.com/page/. No cause for alarm here.

With blogs like this one (a wordpress blog in this case) there will be duplicate content in the various indexes, like tags, categories, date, etc. There’s plugins to insert headers to stop search engines indexing different indexes, but it’s no big deal. The search engine knows the content is the from the same site, and you don’t get punished. People don’t usually link to indexes, they link to articles.

Where you will get punished is when site.com and thief.com have the same content, in this case, the search engine will pick one site as the original, and punish the other. Sometimes they get it wrong. One way to help with this is to put a link on your page pointing back to the same page. That way, if someone scraps you, their copy will have a link back to your page, and the search engine should pick yours as the original. There’s a wordpress plugin that does this for you called RSS Footer.

The other disadvantage of having multiple urls with the same content is stats. If two urls which point to the same content get linked, there’s no easy way to combine the clicks for each link.

So my stance is for urls like site.com and site.net, redirect. www.site.com and site.com, redirect. Where content gets duplicated because of, say, wordpress, I don’t worry about it. Just add a link back to itself, and be happy ;)