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The real question has been: Does Google see these different version as duplicate content? And if they do, are they penalizing my rankings because of it? And if they don’t, wouldn’t I be crazy to tell Google to not index these pages, therefore giving me fewer indexed pages (thus, fewer opportunities to be found in search results)?

Rest easy, Google to the rescue: (emphasis added)

What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional or at least not malicious in origin: forums that generate both regular and stripped-down mobile-targeted pages, store items shown (and — worse yet — linked) via multiple distinct URLs, and so on. In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.

Two points for Google here: First, they at least state that much of the duplicate content issue isn’t intended. And second, they address forums specifically in their definition.

What does Google do about it?
During our crawling and when serving search results, we try hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has articles in “regular” and “printer” versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one version to list. In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments … so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that’ll befall webmasters is to see the “less desired” version of a page shown in our index.

Interesting. So what Google is saying is that the worst thing that will happen if you leave all your page versions to be indexed, is that Google may choose the wrong version to show visitors when they are routed through a search. This means that they won’t dock your rankings because of duplicate content, but they will choose which version that they consider appropriate.

Hmmm… so what does Google suggest that you do? Should you leave all your pages to be indexed – and therefore have more opportunities to be found a Google search?

How can Webmasters proactively address duplicate content issues?
* Block appropriately: Rather than letting our algorithms determine the “best” version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don’t want us to index the printer versions of your site’s articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.

Okay, so even though they say they won’t penalize you, they suggest that you choose ONE version to index and block the others. I don’t know about you, but I tend to follow what Google advises me to do. This actually came up at the Elite Retreat on Tuesday. I asked the question of Aaron Wall because I was curious what the author of the best SEO book on earth would say. He advised me to choose one version and block the rest. Since I can’t recall exact wording, I won’t misquote him here, but when Aaron speaks, I listen.

If you are interested in the full blog post by Google, you can read it here. There are a bunch of great tips on minimizing duplicate content issues that should be read and applied.

For me, I think that whenever possible, we should keep things simple. If an imperfect algorithm will be determining my rankings, it makes sense to be totally clear about what you want indexed. I would rather not leave any confusion about possible duplicate content, but beyond that, perhaps it’s not a good idea to bring in visitors off the archives when the view they gets doesn’t match the actual site. (I have to say that the Archives do make money, but I would rather have the long-term visitor that I may not be converting.)

What are your thoughts on this issue? What are you doing for your forum(s). Have you made changes and gotten results from them? I would love to hear the thoughts of other Admin on this issue as I think it’s an important one.

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

Here’s how it works (and why it’s different than Google Analytics), according to the developer:

With Crazy Egg, we are tracking the exact x,y coordinate of a click as well as form fields, submit buttons and other javascript on-click events. Google’s Site Overlay doesn’t track these things. We are also trying to display analytics data visually, through our overlay and heatmap to make it easier for everyone to learn and react to where their visitors are clicking.

I put it on my list of things to try, but I didn’t get around to that until yesterday. Boy, do I wish I did it sooner…

Things I like:

- There is a free version that gives you ample visits (5,000) to play with to see if it’s right for you.

- The plans are pretty cheap – we are doing the $19 per month plan with 25,000 visits tracked. (You do not need to track every visitor. After a certain number of responses, you will notice that the heatmap does not change substantially.)

- You can block specific IPs so the results are cleaner. It will also email people you would like blocked and give them a link to click to opt-out their IP.

- I love that there is just enough information presented, but not too much that it’s hard to make sense of it. It’s very possible to get too much information in stats programs and then not use any of it properly.

Things I don’t like:

- The reporting can be painfully slow to load. It hasn’t affected out load times, but when I go to view the results, I get frustrated at the speed of their website. (And at times it is down for maintenance.)

- Our drop down menus were NOT tracked – which is frustrating because that should be a main place to leave the homepage, but I don’t know how many people actually use it. (More on that below.)

Here are some things to keep in mind when you are interpreting your heatmap:

- Don’t be sad if most of your page is blank. This records CLICKS and not what people are actually reading. If only it could track time before clicks and user sessions, then I would be happy.

- This is NOT the only tool you should be using to try and improve user experience and maximize revenue – this is only thing in your arsenal. Make sure to compare results to your tracking software (Analytics offers some fairly in-depth results on lots of different variables.). Also consider user feedback (which is easy to get on a forum). And finally, if you are really interested, you could always perform some sort of eye tracking testing. (You have to be really hardcore for that one!)

- When you look at the hottest areas, keep in mind that these areas are exactly what your user most wants on your site. They actively pursued what was on the other side of that link. In the world of two second attention spans and millions of sites competing for our attention, *actually* clicking something is a huge deal and should be taken seriously!

- While you do know who is clicking what, you DON’T know why other stuff isn’t being clicked. You will have to use your best judgment on those links. If something isn’t being clicked that you feel is important, it’s time to make some changes and test again. You WILL be able to see if those changes improve the click-throughs on that link once you test again.

Here are the results from our first test at our laptop forum:

As you can see in the upper right corner, just below the logo, there are no clicks on the “Laptop Discussions” menu (only the Discussons and Photos links have menus in them). That drop down menu takes you straight to the forums and is probably the most-used area on the page (as confirmed by Google Analytics’ site overlay). Because no click is required to open the menu, no clicks are registered. This is a major letdown, but there is more to see on the page, so I press on…

My best observations:

- First, there are lots of improvements that can be made based on these results. We will make changes in the coming week or two and then test again. I will post the results when we do.

- I am surprised at how many visitors go straight to the forum search box located just below the banner. That was added after we launched the new design, and it’s the most-clicked item besides the log in boxes. Clearly, searching the forums right when they arrive is important to our visitors. I think that we should make sure that this forum search box is obvious – perhaps moving it to a more prominent position. How many visitors *don’t* see that box and leave when they don’t quickly find what they are looking for? The only way to know that is to tweak and then test again.

- In the same vein, I know that our search is not that great. It’s a weakness of vBulletin. Once you hit a certain post count (we are over 2,000,000 now), the search just doesn’t work that well. It concerns me to think that so many visitors try to search and probably don’t get the best results. This has worried me for some time, but this reminds me that we need to make sure there isn’t a way to improve the searching experience so we don’t loose visitors with short attention spans and the inability to dig in the forums for information.

- We added the three boxes at the top of the page with this redesign. They were put there to create ‘buckets’ to sort our visitors into. The idea is to satisfy the main needs of our users right when they get to the site. We know that our visitors (those who need navigational help – this doesn’t apply to regulars) are researching, shopping, or just looking for a forum about laptops. From this heatmap, that was clearly a good idea because they are being used. There are no clicks on the Community box, I presume, because the Notebook Discussions menu is used. I can’t be sure of this unless we come up with a way to track that menu. With these results, I know that these boxes are serving a purpose, so the next step is to test and tweak the laptop research and laptop shopping pages on the other side of those boxes. I know that there is a ton of room for improvement on both of these pages, so I look forward to doing a baseline test and then tweaking further. I wish Crazy Egg tracked user session lengths… that would be so perfect.

- It’s worth noting that a large chunk of visitors are already registered and immediately log in. So what does this mean? Do we need more fresh blood? (40% are returning visitors each day – that seems like a perfectly suitable percentage for a forum.) Or does this mean that we are simply losing a lot of people who never click? (And we need more data to come to that conclusion – Analytics would be a good tool as it shows session lengths.)

- The final main observation is that people want to see the notebook reviews. Of course, I knew this already, but the heatmap confirms the importance of this feature to our visitors. We recently rewrote the whole laptop review database to make it more useful and easier to add to, but we haven’t started really promoting it to get reviews. A competitor actually pays $50-$60 per review. That isn’t a playing field I want to be on, so I plan to get creative. Don’t get me wrong, members do submit reviews, but there is a lot of room for improvement (is that a theme here? ). This is actually one thing I would love to tackle at the Elite Retreat next week. There is a marketing angle we are missing here. I would bet we aren’t vocal enough about the fact that we want reviews. I bet we could make it easier to submit them. I bet that we could create a top-notch review database that people really want to be a part of – we just haven’t really gone there yet. Stay tuned on this one. (But the pressure is on seeing this heatmap!)

One thing that I should mention is that there are two other views of these same results on the Crazy Egg Dashboard: a list view that shows actual click numbers, and an overlay view that shows pluses and minuses that expand and contract to show clicks and their percentages. I find the heatmap the easiest to interpret, but I do toggle back and forth for more specific information.

I feel like this post is a bit self-absorbed since it’s all about how to make my forum better, but anything said here applies to you all as well. We *all* could stand to make some improvements, so apply some of these ideas to your site. As you are making adjustments, keep in mind that small changes make big differences, so try not to change a bunch of things at a time. Change one or two things and then test for results. If you don’t get the desired reaction, try again. And remember: your changes could end up creating negative experiences for your users, so carefully watch what you do. If you are really ambitious, you can create two versions of your page and test both concurrently.

I am getting ready to go to the Elite Retreat on Sunday, and this tool will surely help me better prepare me for the conference. I have already identified areas that need critical attention, and this is just the beginning. If you start testing and tweaking with Crazy Egg, please just be very conscious of your users and their needs. Please don’t go nutty changing your whole site around. And when you get results, please share them with us!

Happy Testing and Tweaking!

UPDATE: CrazyEgg has generously offered all ForumTrends readers a free upgrade to 10,000 visits per month plus live reporting. As I said in my post, this is an ample amount of visits to test and tweak your site to make a real impact. To take them up on their offer, simply email info@crazyegg.com and tell them that you are a ForumTrends.com reader and you would like to use their free offer. This is a great deal – I hope it helps you improve your forum!

by Laua Alter, NoteBook Forums

Matt Cutts Page Rank FAQs

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has long been the most important three-letter acronym on the block. Not any more. Move over SEO, SMO is about to crash the party. How does your forum stack up?

I was poking around at TechMeme recently, and I came across a blog post that referenced a great piece titled, “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO).” Since I believed I was up on my Internet acronyms, and this one escaped me, I thought I would take a look. I am glad I did – it’s great food for thought for forum admins.

Blogger Rohit Bhgargava has coined a new phrase for us:

“The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”

Aha! You mean there wasn’t a name for this? Well now there is, and you can thank Rohit. So how does this apply to forums? I thought I would take my favorite 5 rules (actually, now there are 17 in total, but I will only talk about 5 here) and see how they apply to message boards. There is something in here for everyone, and you can probably guarantee an increase in traffic if you implement some of them.

1. “Make tagging and bookmarking easy.” Do you use social bookmarking like del.icio.us? Are you familiar with tagging? These tools are used widely in the blogosphere, but I rarely see forum admin make these tools easy to use for its members. Why not add a small “Digg This” button to each thread? Why not add a couple of syndication buttons to each thread/post so users can just click to save? (Note, don’t go crazy with the buttons! Depending upon your audience, one service may be more popular than another. If you are going to add anything, I would limit yourself to two or three services and make SURE they are not huge!)

2. “Reward Inbound Links.” Very interesting. I really like this one because it’s just plain nice to recognize new incoming links, and it also encourages more. I could see a small section in the sidebar of a forum index with an area for, “Recent Incoming Links” or something where is lists the last 5 places that have linked to you. Implementation is easier on a blog (using trackbacks, etc.), but there are already link reciprocating scripts that can verify incoming links, so I would imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to get this in place if you come up with a method for verification. And if you are worried about sending people to other sites via outbound links, stop worrying. There are a gazillion sites on the net at their fingertips. Don’t let that stop you from rewarding those who are linking to you. You are crazy to think that not giving readers outbound links is going to keep them on your site.

3. “Be a User Resource, Even if it Doesn’t Help You.” This one goes with the last part of #2. Forums are the ultimate collaborative effort. Encourage the creation of resources that people really WANT within your niche. Encourage collaboration amongst members to add to specific, relevant topics and then create really great one-page resources on those topics. (And when you become the ultimate resource for the specific topic, make sure that the proper social bookmarking tools are listed!) All those new inbound links will drive lots of targeted, free traffic.

4. “Reward helpful and valuable users.” Love, love, love this one! Forums are a natural environment for this kind of system. vB already has a bit of a rating system in place with thread ratings and reputation, but I think you could go a step further. Consider showcasing a member every month. Emphasize quality and not quantity. Consider implementing badges to recognize the best/most helpful members in different categories. Consider allowing other members to vote in order to get everyone involved. The options are limitless here, but the message is the same: Reward the members who have made your site what it is today. You wouldn’t be anywhere without them.

5. “Don’t Forget Your Roots, Be Humble.” This goes with #4 a bit, but it deserves its own mention. Don’t ever forget where you came from. Every forum started with zero members. Your members ARE your site. They drive the creation of every new page. I have seen some sites implement changes that the masses hated (like a new design or taking away a feature) and the admin took on a ‘like it or leave it’ attitude (seemingly because they felt criticized). It’s not pretty, and it’s also not necessary. If I may be so blunt, cater to the every whim of your members (within reason). You may not be able to do everything they want, but you darn well better look like you tried. Don’t get too proud and don’t rest on your laurels. (I look forward to sharing the details of our new design launch because we really tried to implement this, so stay tuned for that.) And if you want to know what it’s like to act like an a** to the people who made you what you are, check out Facebook.com’s idiotic blunder.

I think the main thing to remember is that media is changing. I would argue that bloggers tend to be better at implementing changes to take advantage of the social networking/bookmarking/media tools out there, but forums really haven’t tried. Perhaps it’s due to their size and clunkiness, or perhaps forums just already do a good job on their own, but I know that there are several ideas that I plan to implement in the near future on our forum based in this list.

Oh, and before anyone emails me that “Forget SEO!” is bad advice, let me say that I don’t mean to completely forget it. Just remember that while Google has done its darndest to return the best, most relevant results, there is still crap all over the place. Social tools imply human interaction, and that human interaction, in my opinion, produces better results in determining what’s good and what isn’t. As such, I think these social tools with dominate the future… Okay?

by Laua Alter, NoteBook Forums

On Friday I decided to do a few directory submissions myself. Rex and I are working hard on a major transition with our Cruise Forum being moved to the new domain with a completely new look and feel to it. I figured a solid directory listing would be a good thing on the SEO front. The submission was already online over the weekend, so the turn around time was fast. If you are looking for a solid directory with a good page rank, then I would recommend Site Sift as a fantastic choice. Whether you are looking for free or paid placements I think they can offer you good ROI which is very important to any webmaster trying to get a new forum off the ground.

An article in the September issue of Fortune Small Business profiles the fate of several online businesses that have been both blessed by Google and beaten down by Google. We can all relate to the great traffic that comes with good Google rankings – for us, nearly 50% of our five-figure daily traffic comes from natural Google results – but do we know what we might do without that traffic in place?

What about your forum? How much do you rely upon Google surfers?

I think it’s crucial that we all take stock of where we are right now and where we are going with our online communities. Take a look at your traffic, your revenue streams, and your long-term goals. Make sure that you heed the lessons that the business owners/developers/entrepreneurs in this article have learned the hard way. In this ever-changing Internet landscape, no one can be sure how things will be on a daily basis, so make sure all your eggs aren’t in one basket!

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com