inter:digital strategies

One phrase which was repeatedly emphasized during the first couple of days at SES Chicago was “If you have questions about duplicate content, Adam Lasnik is speaking at a session dedicated entirely to that discussion.” This frequently came at the beginning of Q & A sessions following a series of speakers who talked about any aspect of search indexing. Just a hunch, but I suspect the intent was to reduce the number of people asking questions about duplicate content during sessions on other subjects.

Personally, I didn’t go to the duplicate content session. Hopefully this repeated statement did actually cause numerous question-asking individuals to attend that session. It certainly didn’t prevent people from asking about duplicate content in other sessions, however.

Regardless, if you feel like you missed out on learning about duplicate content, have no fear. Adam has just published his thoughts about duplicate content at the Google Webmaster Central blog. I’m going to guess that people who attended SES will have learned more than he’s gone through in this post. Still, the post is definitely a good summary of duplicate content issues and what to do about them. (At least as far as Google’s concerned.)

Barry Welford and Liana Evans tagged me. (For separate blogs; but I’m combining the response into just one post. Duplicate content be damned. What am I going to do? Give away 10 facts about myself?)

1. In high school and college I was a pretty serious goth. Lots of makeup, all black clothing, the whole 9 yards. I varyingly had extremely long hair (to the lower back, usually) and a completely shaved head.
2. I never owned or lived with a computer before 2001. I’d never worked with any kind of programming language; knew nothing whatsoever about this “command prompt” thingamajig or “objects”. I’ve never held a full-time job in anything in the computer industry. On a related note; I’ve never designed a website using tables for layout.
3. Before going into computers and web development, I pursued classical history and music composition. I’ve been accepted to grad school on a number of occasions for each, but never actually went. Schools I’ve been accepted to include Boston University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and University College London. I still play classical music regularly and read on classical topics, but don’t particularly intend to pursue them academically.
4. I don’t drive. I did finally get my driver’s license two years ago, but have not actually been behind the wheel since sometime in early 2005. I will eventually drive, because it’s an unfair burden on my girlfriend for me not to, but I haven’t managed to take that step yet. Driving scares the hell out of me.
5. I grew up in Montana. My mother grew up on a farm in western North Dakota; my father on a ranch in eastern Montana. My girlfriend is a professional horse trainer. Everybody asks me whether I ride: No, I don’t. I’m a city boy: growing up in Montana is not equivalent to growing up in the country.

I’m going to have to tag some new people, here…let’s see — Mike Cherim, Jack Pickard, Emma Sax, Nadir Garouche, and Michael Jensen. (He says he hasn’t been tagged yet - but he started the whole thing! Seems only fair.)

The standard way I tend to view the search world is that Google offers free products, other people expect you to pay for them. This is, of course, a vast over-generalization. After all, Yahoo! does in fact offer any number of free services, from Yahoo! Groups to Yahoo! Answers, and Google offers (or has offered) any number of paid services - such as Google Answers (now deceased) and Enterprise Search.

So, the fact that IBM and Yahoo! are teaming up on a free enterprise search product suggests that they want to put a bit of pressure on Google. And why wouldn’t they? Google’s stock prices just keep going up despite relatively modest increases in their earnings (and certainly not comparable to their total stock value), so why not try and force them out of one of their key corporate markets?

Granted, it’s debatable exactly how much impact this might have. Google’s revenue is largely focused on their search advertising, after all!

This seems like a clear attempt to budge Google out of one of their markets, however - and may be the kind of thing that Yahoo! needs to be doing in order to continue to compete.

The IBM and Yahoo! product, Omnifind, is available for free. You can also read more about it at SEO Principle or Search Engine Land (linked above.)