First Question: Will Google - or anyone else - penalize you if ALL your text on a page is bold? I have a client who is redesigning his home page, and I'm trying REALLY hard not to let his design ideas mess with his ranking... not an easy thing to do. I've talked him out of putting all the text in a graphic The index page has 3 paragraphs of text on it, and the rest is mainly navigation and graphics. These 3 paragraphs are all I have to rank with, and he wants me to bold all of it...he thinks it looks better. Will he be penalized for this? Second Question: What is considered duplicate content? Different customer has forums on their websites - two domain names, two forum templates, same forum database. It is done solely for the purpose of sharing information between the two audiences without forcing them to go to a different website to get it. If the same forum posts are on two different sites, but housed in completely different templates, will google consider that to be duplicate content?
no offense but that 2nd question is HIGHLY debated in the seo world. Might want to start a separate topic for just it
>>First Question: Will Google - or anyone else - penalize you if ALL your text on a page is bold? No. >>Second Question: What is considered duplicate content? Same content on multiple urls, and yes in this case the content will be duplicate nowithstanding the template difference.
1. No you won't get in trouble - though how it will be for the end user.. debate-able 2. Yes it is duplicate - You should make sure the bots can't get at one of them (nofollow noindex)
Well - the bold is good to know - but I'm pretty sure I finally talked him out of it...too bad I can't talk him out of other design flaws As for the duplicate - thanks for the advice - I'll take it to the client and see what they say...I'm not sure what the ultimate solution is here, probably the robot file would be the best solution. Who gets penalized for duplicate content - the first or the second site? And how do sites that republish articles get away with it?
Why not have both sites point to the same forums? No reason to duplicate efforts. The two seperate pages remain as portals to the forums.
For the most part it is a filter not a penalty. If other factors are met it can gravitate to a penalty.. here's more on Duplicate Content issues Generally the ranking authority site with the conent Wins... thus don't use the same content for article marketing that you would for the site.... use unique for both
That's exactly it...the two sites service two completely different audiences, and they look nothing alike. The idea is to keep the look of the website, while allowing these two audiences to share information seamlessly. It works great, we have quite a bit of activity from both audiences - with less fighting than you would think
Having all the text bold wont get the site penalized but it will not let you put emphasis in what really needs to be bold for SEs. To solve that you can use a css class for all the text. font-weight: bold; Code (markup): and still use <strong> or <b> tags in your content for SEO.
I am about to post the same stuff as Gastongr. Anyway, I totally agree with what he said. For example, finding the emphasis (keyword) in an all-Bold 100-word paragraph would be too difficult to score for some search engines. But yes, you won't get penalized.