How long do you spend looking at the structure of your website? Really really looking? And comparing that with what Google has got indexed?

I'm betting it isn't all that long, but the fact that Vertical Leap do spend the time is paying dividends for some of our clients. If you aren't looking at an SEO project every day, it's sometimes easy to assume that the reason a site isn't performing well is down to having very competitive keywords. But the application of some time doing crawl checks and cross-referencing your site with search engine results can yield surprising results.

Google is quite sensitive to duplicate content in the form of very similar pages with only a small part of the page that changes. It is a key factor for dumping you in the Supplemental Index. Although Google is bringing the two indexes closer together, you still want to have a website that Google rates as important. As I said in my recent post about keeping a page out of the search engines there are good reasons to keep some content out, and overtly similar pages is one of them.

For one of our eCommerce clients we found a page that was repeated for every single product they had one their site, which ran into thousands of pages that were exactly the same except for the name of the product. So we used robots.txt to stop indexing of these pages and remove the pages that were already in Google. And bingo, just days later they popped up on Google ranking in the first three pages for their favoured terms.

I love seeing graphs like that (the dark blue line is top 30 positions, lighter blue is top 10 positions), it makes my day (not to mention my client's day)!

Some time ago I read a blog called SEO Is Easy? Let's Look At The Hard 5 Percent and it rang quite true in many ways. There are very few "secrets" in SEO (white hat SEO anyway!) as anyone who has the time and dedication can subscribe to plenty of blogs and learn their way around in a fairly short time. It's the hard 5 percent and the time that we can spend on apparently small things that makes employing a good search marketing company worth it if you don't have in-house expertise or time.