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affCAFF and SEO
Please Note: SEO consists largely of opinion and assumptions on the mechanisms
of search engines (often based on real-world experimentation). Points made in any SEO articles on
affCAFF.com are generally the opinion of the authors, and should not be assumed to be 100%
accurate in their assumptions.
One of the major concerns of webmasters is the issue of "Duplicate Content". It is widely assumed
that multiple websites displaying the same content are either ignored or penalised by search
engines. This article attempts to explain how using affCAFF properly can offer an SEO benefit
to webmasters.
It is very common to find content providers issuing RSS and similar news feeds which are used
on many websites. These are often picked up and used to achieve one of two things: to offer
interesting "sticky" content for visitor retention and customer conversion, or to provide more
content that search engines will index, thus potentially increasing a site's rankings.
If you look at the top search results for the major terms in our industry, you will see a very
large number of sites integrate news feeds from public sources which are often repeated
elsewhere. One thing that also stands out, is that these sites have lots of other content besides,
so the feeds only form a part of the whole.
Some webmasters believe that duplicate content can incur penalties, but most good SEO experts
agree on two things. Firstly, that it takes a "significant" ratio of duplicate content to
other content on a page to raise duplicate content flags in the search engines, and secondly
that heavily-duplicate pages are simply ignored rather than "penalised".
Everyone has their own opinion, and there will never be total agreement unless the search engines
publish their algorithms, which is never going to happen. Personally, I agree that duplicate content
flags are only raised when a page consists of a very high degree of duplicate content. If the site
contains other information regarded as useful or informative, it makes sense that fresh,
regular content alongside the authoratitive information can enhance a page's visibility.
The affCAFF system is designed to do exactly that - to provide content that can be integrated into
websites that already have topical and interesting information. Forming a website based entirely
on affCAFF (or any other) data feeds will achieve very little.
The affCAFF system also takes further steps to assist with this issue. With affCAFF, it is possible
to "merge" data from multiple providers into one stream, and pick the number of items displayed.
Because of the number of properties represented in affCAFF, this means that an
affCAFF webmaster can form streams consisting of data that is less likely to be repeated on other websites
and thus will not flag as duplicate. Even when data from the same provider(s) occurs on multiple
websites, the ratio of data to other content on the page should ensure that a significantly high ratio of
duplicate content to other content can be avoided.
What's more, affCAFF also allows you to "randomise" the order of items in each data stream displayed
on your webpages, so the content will always show some "movement" and stay fresh both for new
visitors and for the search engines.
Aditionally, affCAFF has two other significant advantages in this area. Firstly, it allows users to
link every headline as they wish, so there is no need to have headline links to other sites as with
the majority of other public newsfeeds. Secondly, the content is delivered directly to the website
and integrated within the displaying webpage, so the physical text in any data item counts towards
the page content on that site - again, no third party "plugin" code to contend with.
Overall, affCAFF has been designed not only with usability in mind, but with SEO considerations
too. I am pretty confident in saying that if you integrate affCAFF data streams with pages
containing other content for your visitors, you will not only avoid duplicate content issues,
but because it regularly stays fresh and updates automatically, you could find you actually gain
an SEO benefit from using affCAFF data.
More information and reseach into duplicate content can be undertaken in the Webmasterworld
Google Forum.
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