Welcome to the latest issue of the SEO Chat newsletter! We didn't do any April Fooling this week; frankly, there's no way we could have topped Google and the many other sites celebrating this "holiday." Instead, we'll just settle for continuing to bring you the kinds of tips and advice that help you get an edge on your competition.

We'll start with the article we're highlighting for you this week from eWeek. If you dread upgrading to Vista as much as I do, you'll appreciate this story. It won't make upgrading any easier, but it might let you put it off a little longer if this rumor is true. I'm crossing my fingers.

We started the week off right with some news concerning the Microsoft-Yahoo merger dance. Yahoo is putting up a brave front, and trying to convince its shareholders (and Microsoft) that it's worth a lot more than the software giant's initial bid. On Tuesday we took a look at PageRank changes and whether you need to be concerned. Honestly, how important is PR anyway? Finally, on Wednesday we ran the first part of a two-part series on something that is very important: your online reputation. If you don't know how to keep track of it, or what to do if someone starts trashing your company online, you'll want to take the time to read this article.

We're all about site promotion this week as far as the SEO-related tutorials we're highlighting from Tutorialized. Looking for social media linkbaiting methods? Want to get free traffic to your brand new site? Need to get the word out about your web site on a shoestring budget? These tutorials can help. Why not check them out today?

You've probably heard that older domains and web sites do better in the SERPs. Google indexes sites all the time, of course, so how does it react when it encounters an old domain with lots of changes? This can happen when a site is purchased and the new management adjusts things. So how do you make the changes without losing Google's love? Check out our Thread of the Week for more on this topic.

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, delves into duplicate content issues. We've covered these before, but this time we focus on affiliate sites. How do you avoid duplicating the content of other sites when you're all selling the same product and everyone is getting their content from the manufacturer? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.

Thanks again for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

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Whether you a’re just one person with a small business web site or you have the tremendous online presence of a large company to think about, how you are perceived makes a big difference in your bottom line. You can never control it completely, but you can learn how to monitor your reputation and put your best foot forward.

It is disconcerting, but the truth is that items that reflect poorly on you or your company can come from anywhere: disgruntled customers, former employees, even quite inadvertently yourself. You would be wise to assume that anyone on the verge of doing business with you will Google your name and/or the name of your company. Do you know what comes up for you in a Google search?

I am very pleased to say that nothing embarrassing comes up for me or my company in the first three pages of a Google search. I could not always say that; it was not my fault that I shared my name with a former Playboy centerfold (who seems to have since changed the spelling of her name). But that case of mistaken identity is trivial in comparison to what comes up in Google for some of the best-known companies and brands online.

Read Take Charge of Your Online Reputation

PageRank: Acting Brand New
by Akinola Akintomide
2008-04-01

Late last year something went down in the SEO world, literally. It was big and if you are into Internet marketing you would have noticed it. The Google PageRank of large numbers of publishers (gasp!), the ultimate navel gazing tool, took a big hit. Some dropped by two points and some by as much as 5. Should you care? Does it matter? And what is this PageRank business anyway? Keep reading to find out.

I will offer a "brief" analysis of a somewhat lengthy problem. Not everybody got hit; just a large enough percentage for the differences to be noticed. First I will define what PageRank is (hopefully in an interesting fashion), then I will critique its use by Internet marketers and SEO practitioners.

To some people the news contained in this article is "extremely" old news. Then again, in January Google updated their PageRank again, as they usually do every three months -- so they are about due once again. It looks as if it is business as usual in the Googleplex and there is little or no fear of another huge PR upheaval as there was in November of last year.

Read PageRank: Acting Brand New

Yahoo Sees Rosy Future without Microsoft
by Terri Wells
2008-03-31

Ever since Microsoft made its initial $44 billion bid on Yahoo several weeks ago, the venerable search engine has desperately tried to rebuff the advances of the software giant. From behind-the-scenes bargaining with other companies to announcements that the deal vastly underrates Yahoo, CEO Jerry Yang has been working to keep his company from being purchased by the monolithic monopolist. Read on for his latest move.

The short version is a press release. The long version is an investors presentation (35 pages in .pdf format) that Yahoo filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Both versions present a much rosier future for the struggling search engine than most analysts would have you believe.

Can you imagine a Yahoo that doubles its cash flow and increases its revenues by more than 50 percent in just three years? Without Microsoft buying it out? Apparently Yang can. I have certainly been wrong before but, not to put too fine a point on it, I would like some of whatever Jerry is having.

Read Yahoo Sees Rosy Future without Microsoft

Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other
tech related tutorials.

Submit your website the right way!
Easy steps to submitting your website in the right category.
Read the tutorial.

10 Social Media Linkbaiting Methods For SEO Optimization
Never submit your homepage to the social bookmarking sites.
Read the tutorial.

Promoting your website on a low budget
Learn how to promote your site on a low budget!
Read the tutorial.

65 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Website
There are a lot of ways to get traffic. Here are 65 of them.
Read the tutorial.

11 Ways to Get Free Traffic to your Brand New Site
Your new site is live. How do you get visitors?
Read the tutorial.

How to increase RSS feed burn subscriptions
Basic technique to increase RSS readers.
Read the tutorial.

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What role does the age of your site play in how Google sees it? And how do you make changes to a "vintage" site in such a way that they don't adversely affect how Google views the site? Those are the questions asked in this week's thread. Be sure to stop by the thread and add your two cents.

Age of site factor

How does Google perceive web sites in regards to "age of site." For instance, the Google SEO reference site at seomoz mentions that Age of Site is very important and is based on:

"Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines (note that this can change if a domain switches ownership)."

Question: Recently, our company migrated and redesigned an acquired web site to our servers and under our own management. The domain name stayed the same. After the migration, we updated existing content and added more articles (i.e, added more content). Since we changed ownership, does that mean that Google views the acquired site as a brand new site?

TIA

We've done similar things with our company in that we bought a website, completely redesigned the layout and added content to it (with more than one domain actually). It didn't seem that G saw it as a brand new domain, in fact many of the new pages ranked immediately for their keywords. The one domain was registered in 1996 and we redesigned it in 2006. It is still doing very well today. So if you're careful you can keep all the power of a domain even after it has changed ownership.

Thanks again! I think we redesigned and restructured URLs too soon after the migration.

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread.

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Duplicate Content Issues for Affiliates

Many SEOs know that they should check their content on Copyscape periodically, because duplicate content can hurt their standings in the SERPs. The harder question, of course, is how to fix this. How you do it depends very much on the nature of the content. For example, some site owners syndicate their content for links; the easy answer is not to syndicate any content that you want to use on your own site.

But sometimes the matter is a little more difficult. If your site is an affiliate of another company, selling their products and/or services, they probably supply you with content - just like all their other affiliates. As well-respected SEO Chat forum member EGOL notes, "If you are using the same content source as your competitors then it is time to consider the hard work and expense of original content."

Find a different angle on the product. Interview people who have used the product; ask them how it has improved their lives. Run contests on your site for the 10 most unusual uses for the product. Take pictures of your product in unusual contexts and run them on your blog (your site DOES have a blog, right?). I'm sure if you brainstorm about your product for a while you'll come up with even better ideas.

Fathom, another well-respected member of our SEO Chat forums, came up with four points you should think about in relation to the duplicate content:

• Is the content actually yours?
  
• Did you borrow it?
  
• If yours, did you have it placed on the other domains?
  
• If yours, do you have links to your domain from the copies elsewhere?

If the first, third and fourth items are true, then it's like syndicated content; remove the original from your site so you'll get the full benefit of the links back to your site. If only the second item is true, get rid of the borrowed content and put in the sweat equity to put up something original. If the first item is true but the third and fourth items are false, you may have grounds for a DMCA takedown order - and that could be the subject of an entirely different article. Good luck!

Read the thread for this article.