In addition to what Matt said, some directories are very good resources for links and some niches have more than a few well curated directories that are worthwhile. Don't dispel all directories straight off.
Posts made by Chris.Menke
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RE: High domain authority for shady link directories
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RE: Arrow changes
Actually Jason, the green arrows point up and they indicate how many places your keyword has moved up since the previous report. The red down arrows indicate how many places your keyword has moved down since the last report.
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RE: Will Redirection of Unnatural Links to the New Domain will work?
But if you're redirecting the old domain, no one will be able to land on it and it won't rank for anything.
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RE: Internal URLs competing for keyword
Rasmus,
You've got to build the value of the review pages in the eyes of your target audience. If Google's not ranking them highly enough, it's because Google's not thinking they're important enough. You have to take a really hard look at those pages as compared to those of the competitors that rank at the top of page one and come to terms with what's helping those pages rank well--it's probably links but could be discussion and engagement socially.
Today's SEO is less about the words you use on the page and more about how many people are showing that it's useful to them. When you construct your reviews, you need to keep a laser focus on who the target audience member who will share your content and you have to give them a reason to share yours over the competitors'. It's like concept research, instead of the old fashioned keyword research--you have to conceive of content that has an audience --an audience you can reach out to socially---and which doesn't have so many competitors that you can't get a foothold in the mindshare of your intended audience.
I say that because to me, your review page appears kind of run-of-the-mill (though I can't read it) and that there might not be much there that gives the audience a reason to chose it over someone else's review. It's time to beef up the content and then hit the social networks and bloggers to promote it.
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RE: Will Redirection of Unnatural Links to the New Domain will work?
If only it were so simple Ruchi! Unfortunately, you won't get out of it that easily. It is generally accepted that redirection of your pages/domain will also carry forward any penalty associated with those pages. If the links are pointing to internal pages on mywebsite.com, you can try putting those pages on new URLs and let the page that the links point to go to 404, but if they're pointing to the home page, you're going to have to go through the hard work of contacting webmasters, disavowing, and building good content.
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RE: Google Webmaster Tools Sitelinks Demotions
Steve,
There was an interesting conversation on this the other week over on https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/X1SluyGID9o that might be helpful.
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RE: Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization
Julian,
As TextureMediainc says keyword cannibalization occurs when you target the same keyword on multiple pages. It may also occur when different keywords/key phrases are very similar or share the same words, "67 mustang" and "67 ford mustang", for example or "pink wedding dresses" and "pink wedding dresses with straps"
Keep in mind, too, that the On-page Grader report you are looking at is specific to the keyword you entered into the keyword field when you run the report If you change the keyword, you may get a different result. For example, you may grade one of your category pages for the keyword "wedding dress" and find that it indicates you need to address cannibalization (and you get a grade of "A") but if you grade the same page for "pink wedding dress, you'll may find that it doesn't (but that you grade of "F").
Be sure to look at your site's keywords hierarchically, with your most competitive keywords toward the top of the hierarchy (homepage); that each category of the site has a specific keyword reason for being it's own category; and that the keywords of category sub pages fit logically and distinctly within the category.
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RE: Victim of negative SEO, but will this be believed if the client has not always been whiter than white?
In light of the fact that the client admitted that he recently paid for building spam links, it is more likely that the links being attributed to a negative SEO campaign were actually purchased by the client himself (knowingly or unknowingly) and that they are just recently taking effect.
Nonetheless, in your reconsideration request, be clear about differentiating what links the client attributes to that SEO firm's efforts and the links are attributed to the negative SEO effort, which are continuing to show up. Treat them as separate issues in the same reconsideration request. Start out with something like "We have two issues going on--the client hired an SEO firm that built links from these specific domains [domain 1, domain 2, domain 3,....] but we also have these other links that are accruing from what is believed to be negative SEO and which we are disavowing as they show up...." and then explain your outreach process for the links attributable to the client. If that doesn't work, there's always the option to drop another reconsideration request with a different tactic.
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RE: Top 10 keywords is still going strong but the rest just got smashed!
So it sounds to me that you really just need to focus on the SEO basics, don't do things that you know you're not supposed to do just to try to speed things up (like building a bad link profile) and focus on understanding who your audience is so you can create content that's better than "not too spammy". Remember, doing SEO stuff without a high regard to its correctness or its adherence to Google's webmaster guidelines gets a lot of newbies in trouble.
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RE: Top 10 keywords is still going strong but the rest just got smashed!
By the second point, I meant: is it only your home page that ranks well (for all of those 10 high-ranking terms), or are any of your internal pages also ranking well?
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RE: Top 10 keywords is still going strong but the rest just got smashed!
Eskil,
A couple of things I didn't get from your question that could help in providing an answer:
- How old were the pages that were not ranking as high as you think they should when you made the changes you described in your question?
- Are the keywords that are ranking well on pages besides the homepage?
- How competitive are the terms you are ranking well for and how competitive are the ones you are not ranking well for?
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RE: Technical Site Questions
Hi Ash,
I think you have reason for doubting your code but not being a programmer, I can only tell you to have someone else give you a second opinion. It is odd that your pages do not render in Google's cached version unless you view it as text only. Also, if you use the seobook tool, the html coding isn't included in the report for other domains the way it is reported on for yours. As far as the duel nav menu, that's another programming issue that seems unusual. These issues may stem from the implementation of your mobile site but again, I'm not an authority on that. Do you see any ranking symptoms you think my be attributable to this?
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RE: Free tool which includes a link back to my site
Understood. I guess I just wanted to say that with so many of those tools out there, it will take quite an effort to get the tool into widespread use and that doing so just for to obtain followed links of that sort may not be worth the effort.
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RE: Free tool which includes a link back to my site
Wardy,
Technically that qualifies as a link scheme according to Google. The thing is, they're not exactly editorial, are they and they might not even provide that much algorithmic value to you now or in the future. John Mueller says this:
“If you are providing really useful widgets and you’re linking back to your website in a way that’s clear to the webmaster and maybe in a way that the webmaster can choose whether or not they want to link there then that’s something that might be a great service to those webmasters and might provide value on other websites and those webmasters may be happy enough that they say, ‘Oh this is a great service. I want to tell my friends about this great service that they are providing."
If you want to be clear that you're not attempting to manipulate rankings by adding your link (anchor text or not) you should just go ahead and nofollow it.
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RE: My Backlinks become 404s
You know Gregory and Simobens, I stand corrected. I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that. As Gregory says, good external links pointing to live pages on your site is good. If either the page with the link or the page on your site that the link points to is deleted, it's not good.
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RE: My Backlinks become 404s
Simobens,
No, it will not hurt your ranking in search.
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RE: Target multiple keywords on homepage?
As Matt said, "the client can want whatever the client wants" but it doesn't mean anything unless they have the budget to make it a reality. Off hand, I'd say a project entailing a super-substantial investment in content and publicity and a minimal time frame expectation of at 24 months should be what the client is being told to expect.
If they're your client already, your job would be to give them some sort of estimate of the cost to achieve their goal. Run a OSE report for the client that compares his site with those of the top competitors for one of the keywords, then do the same for each of the keywords. Cut and past the reports into a document and lay them out in front of the client and show them the investment his/her competitors have made in their sites. Then explain that he's probably going to have to exceed their investments if he's going to move above them in the search results.
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RE: Linking structure question
Algorithmically, there could be a benefit to having a link open a new browser window in that by leaving your page open while a visitor follows a link to another page, it may positively influence engagement signals (time on page, for example) google may use for ranking (as far as I know though, there's no data on that, though).
Here's what's been said by a few others:
Hubspot**: **If you're linking to an outside site, you want to give credit to them and drive traffic their way, but not at the expense of your own time-on-site. Opening a link in a new browser window, as opposed to the window they are currently in (your website!) makes it less likely that a user will permanently abandon your website for the one you linked to.
Anne Smarty: There is the fundamental law of the Internet ethics that says that you let the visitor decide how he wants to open the links.
Michael Martinez: Open External Links in the Same Browser Tab or Window....There can be few Website behaviors that are more user-unfriendly than this.
Vitaly Friedman: Should Links Open New Windows? No, they shouldn't
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RE: Lost pagerank due to domain redirect
Keep in mind Martin, that the PR you see on a toolbar is only updated a few times per year and that the actual PR of the second site may have already increased due to that 301. If you notice a change in rankings or traffic for any of your keywords you may be seeing the results of that change.
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RE: Disavow links leading to 404
Michael,
Of course their's no harm in disavowing domains you're talking about (and not much time involved with doing it) but technically, those links are pointing to resources that doesn't exist and I've not heard of anyone who says they've been hurt by links pointing to non-existing resources on their domain. In fact, before we had the disavow tool, changing the url of a page with bad back links was a method used to try to avoid penalties.
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RE: On Page Optimisation - Do I stick or twist?
Hey Ash,
The thing about longer page lengths is not so much that they have more words per se, as much as it is that a 1000 word page may contain a _broader vocabulary _as compared to a shorter page. However, I can give you countless examples where a 300 word page outranks a 2000 word page simply by virtue of the quality of the writing. So, even though everyone seems to be all hung up on "more words are better" you're better off thinking about how well do you understand your audience's questions and how thoroughly have you answered them.
Ultimately, however, ranking is not just about the words on the page, but about your audience's experience with your content--are they clicking through, are they spending time, are they sharing. In order to push you up in the rankings, Google wants to see that your content is important to your audience and its vocabulary is only part of that equation. I might recommend Rand's content manifesto for some inspiration on how to move forward with your site's content. I think what you've described so far is a good start but there is an entire universe of directions you can take it and now may be a good time to start looking at the bigger picture.
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RE: What's the difference between assets and infographics?
Jonathan,
An asset is an unspecified or undefined something of value. Stock may be an asset, a house may bean asset, real estate may be an asset, good looks may be an asset. On the other hand, an infographic is something that is well-defined. You know that they are something that is graphical in nature, is used on a webpage, may have SEO value, delivers a message or information, is of value (if it is helping to bring in more traffic or is spreading a brand message).
So, a (good) infographic may be an asset but an asset may be any of a wide number of things someone considers valuable.
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RE: Huge increase in low quality links - how to get rid of them?
Joanna,
Simply use your disavow tool in Google Webmaster tools and disavow the spam domains (vs. individual pages) that are linking to you. You shouldn't have to worry about them after that.
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RE: Poor Blog and Website DA and links
You could go about changing some of them but I'd focus on your external links. I'd also take a look at Cyrus Shepard's recent post on keywords and instead of applying your resulting Step 7 list to your keyword choices (although you could very effectively use it as such), use your resulting concepts as a starting place for your back link research, as any sites that were relevant to the concepts you end up with in that list would be ideal back link candidates. Also, keep in mind that in your niche, a high DA isn't a prerequisite for being a link opportunity, so long as it's a quality site with a few quality back links and no/few spammy links.
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RE: Poor Blog and Website DA and links
Rugged,
Typically, I wouldn't think that the points you made would have an impact on a site. A "blog" subdomain with posts relevant to the root domian will be seen by google as about the same as a subdirectory so links with anchor text wouldn't be on the top of my list of possible problems.
On the other hand, If you're talking about your own website, I don't seem see all those 190 external links you're talking about--unless you're only talking about the ones coming from the blog. Otherwise, you've only got links coming from one other domain. If that's the case, then your DA wouldn't seem inappropriate and some up and down in DA is typical from one month to another.
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RE: How to get a specific keyword count from a particular country to a particular page in google analytics
Shiraz,
On the left, beneath the AUDIENCE tab, Select GEO, then LOCATION. Then under SECONDARY DIMENSION (above the REGION column), select KEYWORD (underneath the ADVERTISING dropdown list). You can then order the list by country by clicking on the the top of the COUNTRY/TERRITORY column.
This will get you as much of the list as possible, although, you'll have a lot of not provided's.
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RE: Page 2 to page 1
Yes, that's probably fair to say, although, in a lot of niches, you'll need more than just some of one or the other--it can take a lot of both.
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RE: Page 2 to page 1
This is very common. Often those sites on the top of the search results are the ones who's owners have put considerable time and effort into optimizing, while the ones lower down in the results may have little or no optimization (this depends on the search term and the niche). Because of that, it can be very easy to pop up to page 2 with very little effort but moving up from there to page 1 is often the hard part
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RE: Number of other outgoing links on a page
There is no hard and fast rule on maximum number of outbound links a page can/should have or at what at number they begin to lower the value of the page they're on. If all the links on a page are well curated and relevant to the topic of the page or of the site, then having your link on that page too is not going to hurt you. However, as with most things in SEO, there is a "scale" factor,and if all your back links are coming from pages with hundreds or thousands of links, you''re likely to run into problems.
As for the value of such a link--think of the total value that a link from a page can provide as water in a bucket and the more pagerank or authority a page has, the bigger the bucket and the more water is able to fit into it. Now divide that water up by the number of out bound links--the fewer number of links, the more value each passes, the greater the number of links, the less value each one can pass on, until the value becomes so diluted that each one is worth next to nothing.
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RE: Is Yahoo! Directory still a beneficial SEO tactic
James, the Yahoo directory hasn't really been of any value algorithmically for some years--it certainly isn't worth the $300 per year it costs (if it still costs that much). You're better off using that money for other things.
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RE: How do I get impressions with specific search queries on Google places?
Commercial, I recommend the following as good places to start with building your Local Search knowledge so that you can get the impressions and click throughs you're hoping for:
- David Mihm is Moz's on staff Local Search expert and was also the cofounder of GetListed.org--his 2013 explanation of the Local Search ranking factors can be found here: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors
- Miriam Ellis also has a great post on this topic for you here http://moz.com/blog/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide
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RE: Disavow first (and link removal outreach second) as tactic?
Coraltoes,
There isn't any question about whether or not you can go straight to the disavow tool as a first step in cleaning up bad links, as Matt Cutts confirms here. Exactly what the difference is between doing that and first communicating to all spammy link webmasters so that you have that file to include with your reinclusion request isn't so clear cut.
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RE: Does the order of results from "site:www.example.com" tell us anything?
Makes sense to me too and that is nice to know, but that's giving Google a keyword against which it can measure the value of particular pages vs. Google measuring the value of those pages against what it's concept of the domain is in general. Each way provides different insight but use of the keyword didn't exactly answer your original question.
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RE: Linking Out To External Sites
Yiannis, I agree with you that anchor text has a lot to do with tripping the filter and that some industries are cesspools of spam. But, as a replay to a new SEO practitioner's question, I'll stand by what what I said--it won't get anyone in trouble algorithmically. Yes, I know I sound like Jill Whalen (and Matt Cutts) but the longer I'm in this business, the less I have a problem with that and the more I'm willing to leave the higher risk stuff to those who still have a few sites they're willing to churn and burn.
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RE: Does the order of results from "site:www.example.com" tell us anything?
I was just watching a site:domain search for a very small site in the process of being optimized. In fact only a single internal page was being optimized to start with. On that page, the meta data and the copy was changed and on the homepage, the anchor text for a link to that page was changed--that's it. On the day those changes were indexed, the optimized page went from page 3 in the serps for site:domain search to page 1 in the serps for the site:domain search.
My feeling is that the order has to do with Google's determination of how closely (well) related pages are to Google's understanding of the domain's core concept. I think that determination takes into account on-page and off-page factors pertinent to each page.
If you're search pages are outranking your category pages, it would indicate that you need to do some work developing the value of those category pages.
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RE: Linking Out To External Sites
Kered,
Just nofollow them and you'll be OK. Don't look at links that you control as an option to help you build your domain authority. Agencies, tend to lean heavily on the sorts of links your talking about because they're so easy to acquire over time. But let me tell you, I've seen hundreds of agencies briefly rise to the top of the search results on the strength of back links from clients, only to fall off the cliff once some threshold has been passed.
You're not going to get dinged for the kind of link you're talking about if it is a singular occurrence or if they make up a small percentage of your total link profile. The problem tends to be though, that one leads to two; two leads to four; four leads to eight and eventually they outweigh all your other links and then, boom, you take the fall.
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RE: Is this over optimization??
It could even be as simple as greater competition among sites that are relevant to the same search queries your pages are relevant to. Be sure to examine the top sites showing in the results for your target search queries and see what's working for them.
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RE: Is this over optimization??
I can't say that for sure. I only looked over your content and there may be other issues--or there may be no actual SERP issues at all, other than Google's just slow to index your pages. As I'm sure you're aware, there are actually a lot of other things to take into account when dealing with your seo.
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RE: Is this over optimization??
Varun,
I wouldn't call it over optimization, but perhaps, your title tags combined with your content may be a cause. Even if it's not, heeding the following will be helpful to you in the long run.
Yes, it appears that each post is unique and maybe even somewhat "researched", but the combined vocabulary on all of your pages is very homogeneous. As you get more and more of content on your site that fits pretty much the same templated paragraph headings, the overall feel of the words in those paragraphs is that they're all the same, just in different order and different amounts. For the most part your pages contain the same weather, gender, clothing vocabulary. It's the kind of content I call "fluffy"--a lot of words but not really a lot of meaning.
To get a sense of what I mean, lift three or four sentences at random from three or four pages on your site and put them together and see if they form a paragraph of about the same quality as an average paragraph on your site. My feeling is that the more content like this you put on your site, the more it looks like "spun" content and that might be tripping a filter.
I would suggest that each page for each city also contain mention of 3-4 local landmarks, a few local boutique names, 2 or 3 local street names, and a couple of activities, events, the name of the primary mass transportation system, and/or personalities that make that city unique. Going to foursquare and selecting "outdoors" or "sites" as your "I'm searching for" criteria can help your writer with with a starting place for some of these things.
The more you incorporate this additional dimension into your copy, the more effective it will be at converting your clients and the less you'll have to worry about discounting its quality.
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RE: How often does the WMT incoming links gets updated?
Beytznet,
I think it is generally accept by those who have tried to determine an update interval for almost anything GWT-related is that one cannot be determined. It seems to happen when it happens and I think we're supposed to be happy with that.
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RE: Transfering Page Rank to internal pages.
bcgroup,
As long as your navigation isn't obfuscated by javascript, flash, or iframes, and links from your homepage are followed (vs. nofollowed) the tranference of pagerank from your home page to your internal pages normally takes place naturally. Be sure to verify for the above issues and then make sure your architecture is well laid-out:
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RE: Hidden Backlinks
I suspect that you're not going to find anything else but you could go straight to google and use the link:www.domain.com search operator to see what Google shows as back links. That search won't show you everything but should give you an idea if there's more to the picture than what's showing up in those services.
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RE: When creating parent and child pages should key words be repeated in url and page title?
That might be splitting hairs but if I were to choose, I'd point them at which ever had the stiffest competition--if that were the parent, I'd point the sub pages back to it; if one of the sub pages has the toughest go of it, I'd consider daisy chaining them. Some of the value of that linking would probably depend on how evenly PR is spread between the pages, the page's locations in the site architecture, where the the links are located on the page, and whether such linking helps or hurts the conversion process, so ultimately, the desired value of such sculpting may be hard to realize.
What others have said:
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RE: In counting words for a "long article," do comments count in the word count?
It feels like you're paying to much attention to the grains of sand and not enough attention to the beach. Think at scale--do you really want to be editing everyone's comments for ever and ever? How would your audience think about that? If you're audience is prone to misspelings and grammer errors (and whose isn't) so be it. One comment is worth a few errors and google's not going to ding you for that.
Instead, think about how you can get more people who are going to make those errors to your site. Don't knock your audience if they're engaging with your content.
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RE: In counting words for a "long article," do comments count in the word count?
Yes, I read that too. I'm sure you noticed the part about
"Content Rich Sites Get More Links
People feel content is so valuable that they are willing to link to in-depth content more than they are willing to link to content that is short."
Don't confuse google liking links with google liking content. Google likes links--the content...not as big of a big deal (for google).
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RE: Is it possible to get job pages in the SERPs to compete against the likes on Monster and Indeed?
I've worked on niche job sites that rank well on page-one for job searches in their niche even though indeed, careerbuilder, craigslist, and others also compete for it. If you're focused on your niche and partner with schools, employers and others who serve or require resources from personnel in that niche, you can get the links you need to rank. I just takes work.
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RE: In counting words for a "long article," do comments count in the word count?
Don't think about Google "counting" the words on your page--it doesn't really care about how many words it contains. The thing about words is that when used well, they can give others a reason to comment or share or like it--and shares and comments beget more shares and comments. A six word page with 50 comments is a whole lot better than a 2000 word page with none. In answer to your question, the comments on a page do count towards to the pages's content but the fact that the page has visitor profiles that have commented on it is where the real value is.
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RE: Google showing my content on the serps in a different domain
A couple of things come to mind Paessier:
Firstly, what shows up in the search results is a "snippet", which is usually composed of the title tag, along with some or all of the description meta tag, and/or some copy from the body of the page. Additionally, the snippet for a page can change based on the search query, so it's pretty difficult for two pages on different domains to share the exact same snippet (but not necessarily impossible). You can easily tell if the two pages you speak of have the exact same meta description by looking at their source code, which it sounds like you may have already done. If the meta descriptions are not the same, the titles are not the same, and the copy on the two pages is not the same, yet the snippet for both pages in the results for the same search query is the same, then I'd say it's a freaky coincidence that Google happened to slice together the same snippet for two different pages with different meta data and different copy.