What is the “duplicate content penalty”?

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If you’ve done much research into search engine optimization, you’ve likely heard that you should be wary of duplicate content to avoid a penalty from Google. The good news is that there isn’t really a penalty for it, but you should still certainly work to avoid any kind of duplicate content-related issues.

Mark Traphagen at Stone Temple Consulting summed it up very well:

First of all, let’s clear something up: there is no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” The only problem with duplicate content is that Google has to decide which copy should rank highest. And that only becomes a problem for you if the ranking copy isn’t the one you want to drive the most traffic to!

If Google finds multiple copies of content, they do their best to determine who is the original author of it. That content will rank the best, and other content will effectively be hidden in the search results.

How does this happen?

There are two main ways that duplicate content can become a problem.

  1. Theft: If you steal content from somewhere else, or someone steals your content, this situation is likely to surface in one way or another.
  2. Sydication: If you get your content from a news service, they’re likely sending content over that is also going to show up on a bunch of other sites. Your odds of ranking well for those pages is very low.

So what can I do?

The first step is easy; create original content. As long as your content is truly unique there won’t be a problem. The issue that you need to watch out for is someone stealing your content, posting it on their own site, and then outranking you for it! Google should identify that easily enough so that it won’t happen, but there are steps you can take to help insure that you remain the original author in the eyes of Google.

  1. Links/Authority: Inbound links are a big key to SEO success. If you have many links pointing to your site and you’ve built up authority with Google, that will help them to convince them that you’re the right one.
  2. Pubsubhubbub: As Search Engine Journal mentioned in this article, using Pubsubhubbub can be helpful. We often use a plugin called PuSHPress for that, which “pushes” your content out using the Pubsubhubbub protocol as soon as you publish it. Making sure Google sees your article before they see a copy of it (and think maybe the copy came out first) is very important.
  3. RSS Footer: This feature has less usefulness today, but could still be of benefit. Some plugins (such as WordPress SEO by Yoast) include a feature called “RSS Footer”. What this does is append a link back to your site at the end of your RSS feed entries. If a spammer is lazy and simply reposting from your feed, this link will help signal to Google that you’re the original author of the content. It’s potentially a big dangerous because it will be creating “bad” links on those sites, but at this point the benefits still outweight the risks.

Don’t “protect” your content

One last piece of advice is to avoid the urge to “protect” your content. There are things you can do to help prevent people from stealing it, but those also make life harder on your legitimate readers. We’ve covered this in-depth last year, but it applies today. You don’t want to be foolish with your content, but you’ll never be able to fully protect it. Allowing users to easily share it will likely result in more links back your site and be of great benefit to you.

Seriously, your church isn’t made of bricks

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I talked about this four years ago, but feel it’s worth mentioning again.

If you ask most someone: “Tell me about your church“, they’ll usually reply with something like:

Our church is full of God-loving people, we’re friendly to new visitors, we have wonderful music, we have an excellent pastor, we have a passion for missions, etc…

On the flip side, how often do people answer like this?

Our church is covered on three sides with red face brick, and on the back side with HardiPlank siding.  We have Chelsea Green asphalt shingles on the roof, and we’re hoping to re-surface the parking lot soon.

The answer is never!  When you talk to people about their “church”, they know that you’re asking about the congregation.  However, so many church sites feel the need to feature their building as the primary image on their home page.

For Example

I Googled for local churches to find an example, and came across Holy Family Catholic Church.  Not to pick on them, but they do this worse than most.  They have eight different pictures on their home page, and none of them have a single person in them!  In case they (hopefully) change that in the future, a screenshot is on the right.

I saw another site that featured rotating images of their church sign and all of the cute slogans they put on there.  While I’m sure the congregation thinks it’s neat, it’s not helping very much with a first time visitor.  I doubt a non-believer ever came to a church because their sign said “Stop, drop and roll doesn’t work in Hell“.

The solution is very simple; just put some smiling faces on there.  Rotating images are great too, but be sure that it’s not just a black hole for non-Flash browsers (such as the iPhone and iPad).

Your Facility

That being said, I think it’s important to have photos of your building on the site.  In fact, most churches should devote a section to “our facility”.  There are two reasons for this:

  1. If I’ve never been to your church and I don’t know what it looks like, I’ll feel more comfortable trying to find it if I can see what it looks like.
  2. Churches often say things like “the Bible Study will meet in room B-124“, or “join our prayer meeting in the Chapel“.  Where is B-124?  Where is the Chapel?  This is more of an issue for large churches with multiple buildings, but it’s always good to provide as much information as you can.

Just be sure to put that somewhere off the home page (typically in [About Us] –> [Facility] or something like that) and you’ll be fine.  Use that valuable space on the home page to start giving people a sense of kindness and personality about your church.

How much does your church use Facebook? The answer might surprise you.

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I’ve known for a while that our church had a variety of Facebook “groups”.  I had set up a church-wide group, and there were at least a handful of youth-related groups.  I figured maybe 8 or 10 total.  Wow, was I wrong.

I’ve spent the last few days searching, and I’ve found 42 groups so far!  It’s crazy.  About half of them (22) are by/for students, a few Sunday School classes have their own, our music ministry has 7 groups, our Academy has 3, and then there are a few others.  Even our MOPS ladies made their own group!

Now granted, a lot of them are tiny and/or dead (“Girls Retreat 07”), but many are quite vibrant.   So how does this affect you?

First, find your church groups that are out there already.  It’s taken me a while to track all of these down, and I’m sure there’s a few more out there.  Run some group searches with variations of your church name (“mount bethel”, “mt bethel”, “mt. bethel”, “mtb”, etc).  Once you’ve exhausted that, find church members on Facebook and see what groups they are already in.

Second, think about what other kinds of groups you can offer.  A church member built a group for Live it Live (children’s worship program at our church), and our media folks have started posting weekly videos to the group.  We also just added a group for our Encounter (contemporary) service, where they’ll be posting photos, videos, sermon notes, etc.  Both of those could be of great value to our members, and great outreach to potential visitors.

Once you’ve done that, you can cross-promote between Facebook and your site.  Link to Facebook groups from your site (“for more about our upcoming trip to Kenya, join our Facebook group“).  Link back to your site (when appropriate) from your Facebook group.

As church webmasters, we need to start letting go of a little control.  You used to want everyone to come to your site, and that’s still an admirable goal.  However, job #1 is getting information to those that need it, which often doesn’t involve your site.  Our blog posts go out to RSS subscribers, e-mail subscribers, Twitter users, FriendFeed users, etc.  Many people get our bulletin via e-mail, which has lots of great info on it.  We have a lot of members that subscribe to our Podcasts.  Others obviously use Facebook.  None of those people may visit our site, but that’s ok.  As long as they get the information, they’ll still hopefully visit the church and connect with people there, which is the main goal of church-related digital communications.

How else can you use Facebook to facilitate activites at your church?

More fun ways to use the Google Earth plugin

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I just showed you

how you could add a simple location via the Google Earth plugin to your site, but how about a series of locations?

Using EarthSwoop, I thought it’d be neat to show all of the places that we’re sending mission teams this summer.  You could do the same thing for local missions, youth group trips, or anything else outside of your church.

So, I put in all of our mission trip locations, then embedded it into the blog on our site.  Here it is:

Powered by EarthSwoop | More info about this collection

Another way to show a neat map on your website

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A while back I showed you YourMap, an easy way to embed a Google Map on your site.  Google now makes it very easy to do that using their normal Maps site, but here’s a new tool — ShareIt.

Google has recently released the “Google Earth Plugin”.  It’s a free plug-in that runs Google Earth (3D buildings and everything) right in your browser!  It’s quite slick.

The problem is that it’s kind of a pain to use it on your site.  The Digital Earth Blog just did a round-up

of the best ways to use it to embed a map in your site, but I think the clear winner for churches is ShareIt.  It makes it very simple to add a map to your site — probably less than 30 seconds to get the code you need.  Here is what it looks like on your site:

Powered by Google Earth Hacks | Map Details | Create your own!

Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Twitter, FriendFeed and your church website

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By now, you’ve probably heard all about Twitter, the very popular micro-blogging service.  If not, here is a short video explaining it:

At our church, we struggled for a while to find a good way to use this to help reach our congregation, but we’re finally starting to use it effectively.  We’ve come up with a few good uses for it so far:

  • http://twitter.com/mtbethelumc — This is essentially just a feed from our blog, using the WordPress plug-in called Twitter Tools.  We plan to expand it to cover more topics, but it’s just a blog feed for now.
  • http://twitter.com/mtbethelmusic — Our Senior High Choir Tour is currently in progress, and they’re using Twitter to keep the congregation (especially their parents!) informed about the trip.  We’ve done this with other trips, with decent success.
  • http://twitter.com/mtbethelrec — We have a very active recreation ministry, and this is updated if conditions on our field are bad, so parents know whether games have been canceled or not.  It’s very useful for the parent on the go to get a text message with the info, rather than having to pull up the website or call the church office.  We also push this Twitter feed to our main website and our mobile website, using a free script called Twitter2HTML.

Other churches are starting to get on board.  Oak Leaf Church has just launched a Twitter feed.  There’s not much there yet, but they plan on adding things such as important announcements, prayer requests, etc.

The great thing about Twitter is that it works for users of any skill level.  If you just want updates, click the link and read them.  Want an RSS feed?  Subscribe.  Have your own Twitter account?  Follow ours.  Want to stay even more informed? Follow ours and enable text messaging.

All of this Twittering leads to a growing problem: fragmentation.  Using our church as an example, we have a YouTube account, a SmugMug account, a blog, three podcasts and five twitter accounts.  How to keep up?  Enter FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is a quickly growing service that helps pull together all of your various feeds.  We have a FriendFeed account that pulls all 11 of those feeds onto one page.  I have a page of my own that pulls information from 14 sources.  We haven’t started promoting it for the church very much yet, but I’m making sure our account is as connected as possible, because the service is growing very quickly.

How does your church use Twitter? Have you started working with FriendFeed yet?  Or any other similar services?

People might want to print your directions page

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I need to go to Dunwoody UMC tomorrow for a seminar, so I went to their site to pull up directions.  My GPS is dead, so I’m having to do it the “old-fashioned” way by looking up directions on-line. 🙂

When they changed to their new design a few years ago, I told them it might be a problem to have everything

in Flash like that.  The site looks great and is easy to navigate, but the all-Flash approach is a killer.

For starters, Google can’t read much of it, including the primary navigation.  They’re a pretty large church (over 4000 members), yet Google only has 266 pages in their index.  That is bound to create a lot of missed opportunities.  It doesn’t matter how great your site is if people can’t find it.

Back to my problem — directions.  I found their directions page easily enough and the content on it is pretty good.  The address is always at the top of the page, and this page has both a map and text directions on it.  The problem is that it’s ALL buried in Flash!

I can hover over the map image to view it larger, but I can’t click on it to get a large jpg to print.  Since the text is all in Flash, it won’t print nicely either.  To the right is what their directions look like in the “print preview”.  Helpful, huh?

Also, this text being in Flash once again kills potential Google traffic.  For example, their directions page mentions that they’re near Perimeter Mall.  I doubt many churches can say that, but someone may search for it.  If we search for “church near perimeter mall“, they don’t even show up in the top 100!

This leads to three points:

  • If your church is near a major landmark, be sure to mention it on your site, both for the sake of your visitors and for Google.
  • If you put information like that on the site, make sure Google can see it.
  • Make sure I can print your directions page!

As for me, I just went to Google Maps and printed directions from there instead.  I really just need to get a new GPS.

Lots of cool buzzwords, but a non-clickable RSS icon?

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I think this is a first.  I was looking for a domain name for a new project that I’m working on and came across Red Clay Media.  I really only cared that the URL was taken, but I was curious about the site.  Wow!  It’s a brilliant example of why you should never use mystery meat navigation.

What surprised me even more was the random RSS icon they had on the left side of the screen (I drew the awesome yellow arrow pointing at it in the screen shot above).  You can’t click it!

Anyhow, just had to share that.  Don’t try to be so cool that you forget about basic usability and standards.

When people are new to an area, what do they want from your site?

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I got an e-mail today that really got me thinking.  It read, in part:

What are the main things new folks in town are looking for in a church website?  Is it information on specific ministries?  If so, which inistries does that tend to be?  Children and families? Is it service times and directions?

What are the MAIN few things?

It’s a remarkably difficult thing to answer.  Different people are looking for different things.  By looking into the long tail keywords that find your site

you can get some idea, but it’s still very broad.

However, his e-mail said specifically “new folks in town”, which helps narrow it down quite a bit.  Based on that, we’ll assume a few things.  These wouldn’t be true in every case, but probably in most:

  • They don’t know the area very well.
  • They’re already Christians and they’re simply looking for a new church.
  • There’s a good chance they already know what denomination they prefer and they’ll stick to it, though that’s becoming less important to a lot of people.

Based on those items, what’s important?  I would have to say, in random order:

  • Directions/location.  Saying you’re on the “corner of 9th & Main” won’t help, since they don’t know where 9th or Main is.  Give them a good map, your full address, along with text based directions from each direction into town.  A photo of your building on the directions page can help put them more at ease too.
  • Your service times/locations/types.  Do you have a contemporary service?  What’s it like?  What time is each service? What building is each service located in?
  • Information for their kids.  Sunday school and nursery being the main two.  Where is the nursery?  What ages can go there?  Where is Sunday School for each grade?  Is there a program for their middle-schooler, or should they come to the service?
  • Membership information.  I don’t like to push this information on new visitors too much, especially if they’ve never joined a church before, but this fictional family is probably looking to put down roots.  At the very least, provide some information on what your membership process looks like.

What else?  What other items do you think should be on the list?

Animoto now exports directly to YouTube

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Animoto, the very cool video mixing service, has announced that you can now export a video directly to YouTube!

Animoto, for those that don’t know, allows you to create a killer video in about five minutes. You upload a batch of your pictures, choose a song (or upload your own), and tell it to go. It analyzes your song and pictures and creates a video with them. The pictures move in time to the music, and it’s got some cool effects.

If you haven’t tried it before, give it a shot. If you already use them, go dig out your old videos and put them on YouTube! Here is one that we did for our church a while back: