WebProNews is covering the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East in New York, where representatives from the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) discussed how their respective web properties handle duplicate content issues. Following are some takeaways from each.

Duplicate Content in Google

The way Google handles duplicate content has been discussed a lot in recent memory. This is largely due to a video Google’s Greg Grothaus uploaded, in which he discusses at length, the way Google handles a variety of different elements of the duplicate content conversation.

Joachim Kupke, Sr. Software Engineer of Google’s Indexing Team reiterated much of what Grothaus said. He also said that Google has a ton of infrastructure for content duplication elimination:

- redirects
- detection of recurrent URL patterns (the ability to ‘learn’ recurrent url patterns to find duplicated content)
- actual contents
- most recently crawled version
- earlier content
- contents minus things that don’t change on a site

Kupke said to avoid dynamic URLs when possible (although Google is "rather good" at eliminating dupes). If all else fails, use the canonical link element. Kupke calls this a "Swiss Army Knife" for duplicate content issues.

Google says the canonical link element has been tremendously successful. It didn’t even exist a year ago, and is has grown exponentially. It has had a huge impact on Google’s canonicalization decisions, and 2 out of 3 times, the canonical tag actually alters the organic decision in Google.

Google says a common mistake is designating a 404 as canonical, and this is typically caused by unnecessary relative links. So, avoid changing rel="canonical" designations, and avoid designating permanent redirects as canonical.

Also, do not disallow directives in robots.txt to annotate duplicate content. It makes it harder to detect dupes, and disallowed 404s are a nuisance. There is an exception however, and that is that interstitial login pages may be a good candidate to "robot out," according to Kupke.

Kupke says that canonical works, but indexing takes time. "Be patient and we WILL use your designated canonicals." Cleaning up an existing part of the index takes even longer, and this may leave dupes serving for a while despite rel=canonical, Kupke adds.

At SMX, Google announced that cross domain rel=canonical is coming within this year. So for example, if the Chicago Tribune has an article on the New York Times, and the rel=canonical points to the Chicago Tribune then Google will only credit the Chicago Tribune with the content.

Duplicate Content in Bing

As far as how Bing views duplicate content, intention is key. If your intent is to manipulate the search engine, you will be penalized.

Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager of Bing says to consolidate all versions of a page under one URL. "Less is more, in terms of duplicate content." If possible, use only one URL per piece of content.

Bing isn’t supporting the canonical link element (as a ranking factor) yet, but it is coming. They do say to use it, but it’s just not really a ranking factor in Bing yet. Bing says that there has been an increase in the usage of canonical tags in the past 6 months, but adoption issues still exist. According to Parthasarathy, 30% of canonical tags point to the same domain (which is fine), and 9% use it to point to other domains. This could be a mistake or it could be manipulative. Bing says they will look for other factors to try and determine which it is.

Bing says canonical tags are hints and not directives. "Use it with caution," and not as an alternative to good web design.

With regards to www vs non-www, just pick one and stick with it consistently. Remove default filenames at the end of your URLs. Bing also says 301 redirects are your best friend for redirecting, use rel="nofollow" on useless pages, and use robots.txt to keep content you don’t want crawled out.

Duplicate Content in Yahoo

If everything goes according to plan, you’re going to need to worry about how Bing handles duplicate content if you’re worried about how Yahoo handles it, but Yahoo’s Cris Pierry, Sr. Director of Search, offered a few additional tips.

Pierry says descriptive URLs should be easily readable, and it’s not a good idea to change URLs every year. In addition, use canonical, avoid case sensitivity, and avoid session IDs and parameters.

Pierry also says to use sitemaps, and submit them to Yahoo Site Explorer. Improve indexing by proper robots.txt usage, and use Site Explorer to delete URLs that you dont’ want Yahoo to index. Finally, provide feeds to Yahoo Site Explorer, and report spam sites linking to you in Site Explorer.

Yahoo says metadata and SearchMonkey are enhancing presentation.

WebProNews reporter Mike McDonald contributed to this article from SMX East.
 

The tips are all aimed at making your online video efforts more successful by optimizing them for search engine performance and ultimately driving more views and traffic back to your site. So, here they are in no particular order:

1. Encode video files with good metadata like titles, dates, authors, descriptions and keywords.

2. Offer multiple formats (e.g. mov, mpeg, mp4, flv).

3.  Include keywords (and the word "video") in the filename.

4. On the page, follow general SEO principles for optimizing (title, meta, H1, etc. tags and URLs).

5. Include contextually related links to articles and other videos on the page.

6. Post captions and/or abstracts as additional relevant on-page content.

7. Use Unique URLs.

8. Use one video per URL.

9. Use embedded players rather than pop-ups or links to files.

10. Create nav links to the video content.

11. Place video files in one central directory called "videos" off the root of your folder structure.

12. Enable comments.

13. Include social bookmarking tools.

14. Allow visitors to subscribe to your videos.

15. Let viewers grab your embed code – easily (with a link).

16. Remember internal linking (consider site-wide links in your page footer).

17. Distribute your video to the top video search sharing sites.

18. Include titles, descriptions & keywords on YouTube, etc.

19. Create a video site map with a mRSS feed.

20. Control associated page text to optimize for search engines.

21. Control the player (which may drive future video SEO).

22. Shorter videos are better.

23. Don’t spend a fortune.

24. Include end slates with URLs.

25. Drive people back to your site.

26. Thumbnail images matter.

27. Look for new opportunities for video placement (think about things like Google’s product search).

28. Figure out what keyword phrase is most relevant (and winnable) for your video.

29. Look into including videos in Google Place Pages.

30. Set up a Google video XML sitemap.

31. Use tools like Tubemogul’s to optimize metadata across the major video sharing sites.

32. Track viewership.

33. Advertise with video via rich search ads with Google/Yahoo and YouTube promoted videos.

34. Make sure your videos live on your domain and use 3rd parties for distribution purposes.

35. Stay on top of technology changes and new standards.

Do you have additional tips for increasing your online video success? Share them with WebProNews readers.

(Coverage of the SMX Eastconference will continue at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

In the session "Trademarks & Paid Search: How Thing Have Changed?" the panel discussed the issue of keywords, trademarks and infringement.

Deborah Wilcox
Baker & Hostetler, LLP

Deborah Wilcox, Partner, Baker & Hostetler, LLP, said, "Trademarks are all about brands." Just because a word is in a dictionary does not mean that the word is free to use.

A generic keyword is not trademarked. Descriptive keywords are not yet strong enough for a trademark.

Establishing trademarks right is usually associated with who is using the mark first.

Infringement occurs when someone is using another’s mark that is likely to cause consumers confusion or to cause a mistake or to deceive as to source.

Is the sale or purchase of a trademarked keyword constitute use in commerce? If the ad that is triggered has the actual keyword in the title or text, then yes.

Trademark law is established to protect consumers from being misled in purchasing decisions.

 Courts apply multi factor test

•  strength of the trademark.
•  Similarities in goods and services
•  wrongful intent to trade off of goodwill
•  actual consumer confusion

With keyword triggered ads, how might there be confusion?

- Are all the users typing in a search term, looking for the trademark owner’s site?

- Are users able to distinguish among all the different ads they are served within the results, or are they duped into thinking all the sponsored links are official links.

Permitted use of trademark:
- Descriptive fair use of mark in ordinary dictionary sense… (talking about apple the fruit)

- to identify the authorized product (resellers and making things that are compatible with the brand)

- providing information (writing or blogging about a brand)

- comparative advertising (can be very subjective — for example when you compare your product by name to your competitors name/brand) — very tricky and subjective..

Laura Covington, Associate General Counsel, Global Brand and Trademarks, Yahoo, said Yahoo’s trademark policy is premised on fair use. Competitors cannot bid on trademarked terms.

4 ways to raise trademark related questions from yahoo with search marketing:

Trademark complaint
Counterfeit complaint
False and misleading complaint
Copyright DMCA

Microsoft Trademark policy:

Limited range of advertisers that can bid on trademarked terms:
Resellers, information sites and dictionary terms.

Google’s Trademark Policy:

Google will launch a limited investigation. If the investigation fids infringement, they will take the trademark out of the ad, but leave the ad up.
 

WebProNews reporter Mike McDonald contributed to this article from SMX East.

Android is open and freely distributed, and it can be programmed in Java as well as C/C++ components. It can be coded on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and can run multiple apps and have onscreen widgets. It can run Flash videos on updated versions, and it has forthcoming text to speech recognition with translations.

iPhones are massively popular, but Android devices are on the rise. There are over 40 different Android phones on the way over the course of the next six months (globally). Look at this graph from Flurry Analytics, which depicts new project starts between iPhone and Android.

Martin provided the following stats about why you should be thinking about Android:

- New Android apps are accelerating by more than 50% Month Over Month vs iPhone’s 30%

- Approximately 15,000 Apps in The Android Market plus other free "markets" – 64% FREE

- By 2010 an Android phone will be on every US carrier and most globally

-  Over 20 Android phone manufacturers including HTC, LG, Motorola, LG, Samsung, & Sony

He also listed the following benefits of the Android market:

- One Time $25 Registration Fee to submit unlimited apps

- No Submission Process (reviewed only by user complaints – approximately 1%)

- 24 Hour Buy & Try Return Policy

- Donut puts The Android Market interface on par w the App Store

- Paid Apps put on the forefront & sectionalized

- Soon to add PayPal, Credit Card & direct carrier billing w Checkout

- Listed in order of User Ratings

- Users regulate apps NOT Apple AT&T Google

- Google Voice – "There’s an app for that… on other phones" Jeff Sharkey Google Android Engineer

Android has apps for things like Facebook, Pandora, Quik, Ustream, Spotify, Twidroid (for Twitter), etc.
It’s not hard to envision much more widespread adoption of Android devices as an alternative to the iPhone.

The point isn’t that one is better than the other. The point is that both should be taken into consideration by marketers hoping to reach the widest mobile audience possible. It’s like optimizing for Google and Bing. You may prefer one to the other, but you still want users to find you in both.

(Coverage of the SMX East conference will continue at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Maile Ohye, who is a developer programs tech lead at Google, in fact started by talking about things site owners should disallow via robots.txt or no-index/no-follow tags.  Login pages and calendars are two examples she gave, and this idea extends to anything that lacks meaningful content that you would want to have indexed.

Ohye then got into some tips about improving page speed.  In order to reduce load time, she suggested ordering the CSS and external scripts on your pages efficiently.  Placing style sheets above external scripts allows for parallel loading, she noted, which is much faster than the alternative.

Next, Sasi Parthasarathy, a program manager at Bing, swung things in a different direction by stating, "Security is the biggest problem plaguing the Web right now."  Spammers and malware providers are always looking for sites to hack in order to get link popularity, and he said that if you if you fail to take security seriously, you may lose credibility among both users and search engines.

So stick to good practices like creating strong passwords and keeping your software up to date.  Parthasarathy suggested using anti-malware tools to look for security vulnerabilities, as well.

Finally, try to ensure that config files are not too accessible, and carefully monitor forums and blogs.

(Coverage of the SMX East conference will continue at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Ken Jurina, President, Epiar, spoke about Firefox extensions. Jurina said they work right in your browser and are quick, powerful and free.

Other tools he recommended included SpyFu, which gives insight into PPC/ organic insight. Browershots displays what a site looks like in a variety of browsers.

Google Insights for Search flags phrases by topic, brand, and category you want to rank on. There is a breakout tool area that displays phrases that spike in search frequency that can help in keyword search.

Time Fox is a time tracking tool that will help you with productivity. Epiar Marketview allows you to datamine and analyze keyword research, but it is not free.

Debra Mastaler, President, Alliance-Link, spoke about tools for link building. Xenu’s Link Sleuth checks for broken links and verifies normal links, images and frames.

Link Valet does the same but doesn’t require a download. For authority links try the Langreiter tool or GoogleGuy.

HubFinder compares the back links of 2 or more sites and points out their co-occurring bank links.

Back link analyzers include SEO Elite and PR Prowler, which are paid tools.

Both SEO Link Analysis and Link Diagnosis are Firefox extension that gather page rank information. "You can’t control who links to you, but you can control who you link to," said Mastaler.

Domain tools like Dapper.net creates RSS feeds for sites that don’t have them and provides users with content and services through widgets, RSS, Google gadgets and many more.

Mastaler says to, "Just find a set of tools that you are comfortable with and use themeveryone won’t be the same."

Stephan Spencer, President, Netconcepts, says seo-broswer.com is good to use because you can go to any URL and see what the spider sees.

Thumbshots.com allows you to compare a search term using a search engine and compare it with another search term.

InternetMarketingNinjas.com has expensive tools but are worth it.

Woopra is very new and allows you to see the traffic coming to your site in real time.

Robot Replay is a tool that lets you paste JavaScript and it records the mouse movements as the users navigate your site so you play those back and see how users move the mouse around.
 

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

(Coverage of the SMX East conference will continue at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

To start, James Grimmelmann, an associate professor of law at New York Law School, pointed out that it’s not illegal to be a monopoly – the only company in a business.  The problems start when a company drives others out of business.

Search Engine Land’s Chris Sherman thinks competitive responses to Google’s success are possible.  Microsoft, for example, has taken some steps towards transparency in China.  If Yahoo responded in kind, pressure would be put on Google to do something similar.

 James Grimmelmann

This led us to the Yahoo-Google deal, though, which almost everyone at the session viewed with suspicion.  Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikia Search (and that little thing called Wikipedia), thinks Yahoo would be abandoning a core part of its identity.  Kevin Ryan, the CEO and founder of Motivity Marketing, doesn’t like the idea of a single, dominant source of information.

Still, Shelly Palmer, the managing director of Advanced Media Ventures Group, pointed out that everyone’s digital footprints are plenty big even when Google’s removed from the equation.  And the speakers agreed that Google’s work in the mobile market has provided the dominant carriers with some much-needed competition.

So a "Googleopoly," as the conference session’s title labeled the company’s possible dominance, might not be too much of a cause for concern just yet.

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

(Coverage of the SMX East conference will continue at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Nathan Buggia, Microsoft’s lead program manager of Live Search Webmaster Central, started things off by directing people to look at the Arbor Snowboards site.  Although great for users, it’s much less so for search engines.  Buggia recommends that folks learn about some better alternatives at janeandrobot.com ("search friendly design patterns for web development).

Sharad Verma, Yahoo’s senior product manager of Web Search, later stepped up to give some more specific advice.  While CSS is good, he believes external CSS is better, for example.  You shouldn’t disallow CSS in robots.txt, and don’t hide text using CSS.  As for Ajax, use href links, use spot Ajax, and turn off JavaScript in your browser and ensure that the content is navigable.

"Search engines are getting there," Verma noted.  "We are not fully capable but we are making progress."

This brings us to Tony Adam, Yahoo’s SEO manager.  He recommends being strategic in your Ajax implementations, and applying progressive enhancement to the task.  Adam suggests working with standards or platform teams to build standard interactions, and looking at what Jeremy Keith has done.

One last, solid piece of advice from Adam: "Take care of things before it even starts."

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

(Coverage of the SMX East conference will continue at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Paid Search Services, Apogee Search, said there are many ways a campaign can fail such as plenty of clicks that don’t convert.

Ruehl said to run Google’s query report and cut out irrelevant clicks and impressions. Also look at search terms through your analytics program.

Occasionally, keywords should be deleted. "Make sure your ads are coherent and responsive." Keep out unqualified traffic and don’t be afraid to qualify your ad.

Use a call to action and prepare the searcher for conversion in the ad. Focus on action verbs and avoid generic calls to action.

Make landing pages relevant, have clear goals and calls to action on your landing page.

Joanna Lord, Senior Search Strategist, OneTime.com shared tips on surviving a dip.

1. Isolate the problem
Keep detailed team-based records (daily blogs)
Internal database (suggests Twiki, Yammer, Basecamp)
Hold a meeting

2. Consider the context
Go beyond vertical
Tools, applications, engine changes (veryrecent.com)
Industry movement, mergers, buyouts

3. Determine the plan
Go beyond hedging your losses
Each company is different, don’t make assumptions
Make well-analyzed, incremental movements

4. Execute
Hardest one for most companies
Don’t waste time overanalyzing
Don’t change multiple variables at once
Set reasonable expectations post-execution

Lord stressed, "Slowing yourself down is really essential in this industry."

Andrew Goodman, President, Page Zero Media, said, "Success and failure are just flip sides of the same coin."

Correctly building a campaign requires strategy, architecture, patient execution and testing. Quick fixes can make things worse.

"Our mind wants to have a reason for things," said Goodman.

Two kinds of account failure:
Quality Score Failure
Measurement and Strategy Failure

Quality Score:
Tight targeting
Catching bad guys

Strategic Planning
Form action plan collaboratively.

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.

(Coverage of the SMX East conference will continue at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

There are, in short, a lot of them.  And there were a lot of speakers at this session, as well, with people from the John Edwards, McCain-Palin, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney campaigns tossed in with Google and Yahoo representatives.

Members of the group very much liked the concepts of geotargeting and microtargeting.  Eric Frenchman, the McCain-Palin campaign’s chief Internet strategist, confirmed, "Everything we do is geotargeted and microtargeted."  Other folks talked about trying to get campaign managers to accept the importance of search engine marketing.

This leads to another point on which everyone agreed: not enough money is being spent on online campaigns.  So even if the candidates seem to have made large strides this year, in 2012, we can probably expect to see a great deal more in the way of online advertising.

The speakers also believed that politicians might learn a lot about paid search advertising from corporations, so look for some similarities there.  Diane Rinaldo, the political advertising director at Yahoo, observed, "Retail is a lot like politics."

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Johnson contributed to this report.