We are excited to have SEO pioneer and expert Shari Thurow as a guest blogger this week. She shares with our readers a preview of her upcoming panel discussion at SES, in Chicago next week.  Our Ad Director team will be in attendance, so please come by booth #405 to explore automated SEM optimization (self-learning) over bid management.

Many thanks to Shari sharing her insights and putting together this post!

The way search engines view duplicate content is not the same way that the average search engine optimization (SEO) professional views duplicate content. The typical way search professionals view duplicate content is a percentage value, such as, “These two Web pages have 65% similar content and 35% unique content. If I change one page’s content so that there is only 64% similarity, search engines will not consider these pages to be duplicates.”

As tempting and easy as it is to make this simple calculation, it is not accurate one. Search engines do not calculate duplicate content with such a simple equation. Many beginner and expert SEO practitioners alike are not aware of the various duplicate content filters that search engines have at all three points (crawler, indexer, query processor) of the search engine process, some of which I will be discussing at the Chicago Search Engine Strategies Conference.

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I’m going to dedicate this posting to the billions of dollars being wasted on SEM marketing, and those who unwittingly contribute to it. Even in ideal market conditions you’d think this would be a concern to any major advertiser, but given recent events now in particular is the time to re-evaluate the effectiveness of your SEM advertising dollar.  Of course I’ll be discussing WebTrends Ad Director specifically, but other similar technologies exist, such as Efficient Frontier.  And while I could dig into some biased opinions on why Ad Director is the technology leader in this space, it’s more important to me (for now) that readers understand the principle of automated SEM optimization, as a stark contrast to bid management. As is a tedious habit of mine, I’ll start with some history…….

Let’s go back to the abacus (just for a sentence!). Although very simple, just a wooden frame with beads that slide along wires, this device gave humanity an addictive first glimpse into a reality of machine-aided calculations. Move forward a few centuries—past the invention of the hand-held calculator and parallel computing, a computer’s victory over a world champion chess player and successful forays into artificial intelligence—to the present, where technology is freeing humans from the drudgery of repetitive tasks. With relative confidence we can now relinquish control of everyday things like balancing our check books and navigating through city streets, for example, and can shift our focus to activities requiring more non-linear intuition and decision-making.

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