I admit it. I am a search engine geek. Because I have a passion for understanding search usability, one of my particular interests is duplicate content filtering. If you want to really irritate searchers, present the same content to them in all or most of the top 10 positions in search results.

In the past, before search engines became effective at name results clustering, many search engine optimization (SEO) professionals, including myself, considered it quite the accomplishment to help client sites appear in the majority of the top 30 search results. I remember when one of my client sites held 24 of the top 30 positions. He thought I was the greatest invention since the light bulb. However, having analyzed the search data and Web analytics data, I realized that having all of those top positions did not necessarily mean top conversions. So I was happy to see how search engines are becoming increasingly effective at filtering out duplicate content.

Click to continue reading...