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.

(more…)