This should be an interesting read. Thanks for sharing the info John!

Awesome, thanks John

your welcome.

I wonder how that criteria of clone sites affects FAA. Pixels is now the main site (supposedly?). While FAA is an independent domain from Pixels does Panda recognize both to be clones? Hard to tell. And also AW. Is that considered a clone as well? Maybe Abbie can chime in on this one.

Thank you John, looking forward to the read.

The Holy Grail. Thanks!

I don't know how any of this applies to FAA or any of the other sites like Pixels, AW ect.. I was looking at it from the standpoint of my own web site. Not that I understand everything they are talking about but it did give me some things to think about to do with my own site.

John,

I woud think, no, hope that Sean is ahead of this and "old news" to him! As artists here and I haven't read the whole article yet,since I don't understand most of it, I don't know what to do or how to react to this.

What do you think this means?

Rich

Speaking only about my own website I have two takeaways:

1. Increase social shares
2. Robust About Us info Inc. Mission Statement, Company Directory and other onsite signs of legitimate business

"I wonder how that criteria of clone sites affects FAA."

According to the article, duplicate anything doesn't help.

Item 3:
"Duplicate Titles and Meta Description (MC Nov 18, 2013)"

Item 7:
"Clone sites are a strong panda factor (JM, Mar 10, 2014) — Don’t forget Google’s canonicalization algo will auto-301 sufficiently identical sites to a single site whether you want them to or not, SER, Feb 25, 2014."

FAA will continue to have search engine priority over it's clones, until it is effectively deleted or substantially changed.


Dan Turner
Dan Turner's Seven Keys to Selling Art Online

John,

Thank you that was a good read, the comments were helpful too.

Dan,

Thank you, what do you mean by FAA having "priority?" Does that mean one needs to log into FAA and upload rather than the other sites?


One of the commentators said Google crawled Pinterest and to use "Alt descriptions" of your artwork. Does anyone know what they were referring to with "Alt," tags and keywords?

Wow. So when we post our images on image threads in the discussion forum and we change our title and alt attributes to keywords about the images, it may actually hurt us.

Under the "Low Quality Factors":

"4. Aggressive “search phrase” keyword use onsite, INCLUDING: URL string, page content, AND HTML code like TITLE or ALT attributes (JM, Dec 2, 2013, Jun 6, Aug 11 2014 – also leaked Jun 6 that panda does crawl pages looking for factors, and Mar 28 2014. MC on Mar 13, 2014, SMX West.)"

"FAA will continue to have search engine priority over it's clones, until it is effectively deleted or substantially changed."

Or until an alternative site is specifically set as the primary, using one of the techniques described here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

This is already done with our AW pages (they include code to tell search engines that the AW site is a duplicate of our FAA profile URL, and that they should favour the FAA URL over the AW domain, which is why AW sites rarely show up in search results).

"I wonder how that criteria of clone sites affects FAA. Pixels is now the main site (supposedly?). While FAA is an independent domain from Pixels does Panda recognize both to be clones? Hard to tell. And also AW. Is that considered a clone as well? Maybe Abbie can chime in on this one."

Google will very easily detect that Pixels and FAA have the same content (as well as the other FAA domains, such as fineartengland.com, fineartdownunder.com, and your AW site), and only show one set of results.

With the exception of AW sites, which specifically tell search engines to favour the corresponding FAA page (as mentioned above), there isn't (as far as I've seen) any guidance to search engines as to which of the main FAA sites to pick, so Google will pick the most popular, which is fineartamerica.com. This has far more pagerank than any of the other domains so will be seen as the primary domain. You'll struggle to get any of the other domains to show up in a search result without specifically including keywords to force them to be present. (Make sure you at least use Incognito Mode/Private Browsing if you test this, otherwise Google may tailor results to the pages you commonly use).

FAA could tell search engines to favour Pixels (or any other FAA-owned domain) over fineartamerica.com if they wanted to, which would almost certainly be honoured. However, while it's generally accepted that some pagerank will be passed from the secondary domain to the primary, it's also believed that not all the pagerank is passed. In other words, while doing so would almost certainly result in Pixels showing up in the majority of search results instead of FAA, it would also almost certainly result in it showing up further down the search results than FAA currently does.

though i wonder how it handles a domain change. i think all links lead back to fineartamerica (and now that might have switched over to pixels). so if google came here, it would be no different than having a few different urls. it's not really a copy, but a redirect to a different domain. so i wonder if google does really see it as a clone?

the extra internal links however works against us.

the social thing is interesting and it shows that google looks at that very much. though i wonder if it looks at it's own google plus feed, or does it look at public facebook and twitter as well. does it take the time to open a tiny url and see where the link goes? or does the url company get the credit?

i know a few think that pixels comes up in the search, but it doesn't. if your history is on, it will prefer that site. but if its off like i have it set too, you get the real results. pixels doesn't come up, despite having millions of pages.


some of those things there i wasn't sure about - like how does google know how useful the content is? and mistaken facts? how does it know they are wrong?


---Mike Savad

Following

@ John, thank you for the article. This is a read and reread article!


@ Alexis - as usual, you're truly our Go-To-Google-Guru-Guy! Thank you for contributing. Your help will go a long way with helping us to make sense of what's going on. :)


--Donna Proctor

Alexis,

Good info!

The parts I understood! When Pixels went live, did that change overnight,as far as Google seeing and favoring,still, FAA or is it a gradual thing,taking weeks? I still believe and others here too, that "something" happened back in March/April(PIxels came out in April) and for me, all downhill since,even though I've uploaded hundreds of new images,now over 2400,

Rich

Pixels came out last summer. August 2013 I think. Licensing came out in March/April

there was an announcement recently that pixels.com will be the main site. don't remember if there was a date associated with this.

John,

I knew that! Just checking if anybody was reading this!!! LOL!

I've added about 600 new images, but seems not to have any direct effect on sales.

Rich

though i wonder how it handles a domain change. i think all links lead back to fineartamerica (and now that might have switched over to pixels). so if google came here, it would be no different than having a few different urls. it's not really a copy, but a redirect to a different domain. so i wonder if google does really see it as a clone?

If you move your site from one domain to another, then you should use what's known as 301 redirects. This sends all visitors (including search engines) from site A to site B, and tells search engines (by use of a message hidden in the HTTP headers) that the page has permanently moved to the new address. This should be done on all pages on the site (there are various tools that make this not as difficult as it sounds).

If you do this, then your new site will pick up all the pagerank that the old site had (after a few days for the search engines to fully reindex). This is the correct way to move a site.

http://searchengineland.com/google-pagerank-dilution-through-a-301-redirect-is-a-myth-149656

In FAA's case, nothing is redirected anywhere -- you can go to the same URLs on fineartamerica.com, fineartengland.com, fineartdownunder.com, pixels.com, etc., and they will all return pages on those domains. (A redirect would mean that if you went to faa.com/address, your browser bar would automatically change to pixels.com/address). Although there are some very minor changes in the page content, the vast majority is identical, so Google will see all of the equivalent pages on each site as duplicates of each other, and check to see if the site announces which one to prefer. If it doesn't, then it will pick the one it thinks most appropriate (usually the one with most pagerank, except in extenuating circumstances).

the social thing is interesting and it shows that google looks at that very much. though i wonder if it looks at it's own google plus feed, or does it look at public facebook and twitter as well.

It will look at any public page it can find, so if your Facebook or Twitter feed are linked anywhere on the 'net, then they will be found and considered. However, almost all links that you can put on Facebook or Twitter are marked 'nofollow', which (confusingly) doesn't mean that the search engine won't follow them, but means that they shouldn't contribute to the pagerank of the site they point to. In other words, posting links on FB or Twitter will allow search engines to find the linked pages, but it won't boost them up the search rankings.

However, there are various algorithms to determine the 'authoritativeness' of a social network source, in the same way that the authoritativeness of pages can be calculated. I wouldn't be surprised if a link is shared by a number of social network contacts who Google have determined are very highly regarded, if it might not start to boost that result, even though pagerank isn't explicitly being passed.

While they can, of course, make far more educated judgements about their own social networking site, I'd be very surprised if they don't also do similar things on the other popular social networks.

does it take the time to open a tiny url and see where the link goes? or does the url company get the credit?

Absolutely, it will follow URL shorteners. URL shorteners mostly use the same technique I discussed above, 301 redirects, which pass pagerank through them. So using a URL shortener that uses a 301 redirect is just as good as posting the link unshortened (except in exceptional circumstances, such as the URL shortener being down, which of course means Google can't follow the link). Almost all URL shorteners these days use 301 redirects -- there's a list here, but note that if your preferred shortener isn't listed, that doesn't mean it's doing it wrong (necessarily):

http://bradsknutson.com/blog/25-url-shorteners-301-redirects/

i know a few think that pixels comes up in the search, but it doesn't. if your history is on, it will prefer that site. but if its off like i have it set too, you get the real results. pixels doesn't come up, despite having millions of pages.

It absolutely will come up in certain circumstances -- all Pixels pages are indexed. But because Google sees all the different domains as duplicates, and will only ever show one, and because FAA has so many more backlinks than the other sites, you need to really force it to get the others to show up, usually by using keywords that only exist on the specific duplicate you're interested in. (Or, as you say, by letting it see your page history) For example, here's a search that should bring up Pixels in the results for most people:



However, it's still a completely unrealistic search that I crafted specifically to bring it up -- by using the words 'canvas print' to favour FAA's high ranking for those keywords, and then forcing it to pick the Pixels duplicate with the phrase 'galaxy case', which only appears on that specific FAA property. Obviously, a canvas print galaxy case isn't something that actually makes sense!

some of those things there i wasn't sure about - like how does google know how useful the content is? and mistaken facts? how does it know they are wrong?

Google does have a lot of language parsing technology to pull facts out of pages -- for example, ask it how tall the Eiffel Tower is. If you start contradicting facts that Google can clearly determine from a number of authoritative sites on your site, Google will be able to spot that. It's not something I'd worry about though.

Bear in mind that, despite the click-bait title, this is neither complete nor necessarily entirely accurate. It's a bunch of hypothetical determinations based on public Google statements and experimentation. Take it with a pinch of salt. It's also important to realise that Google is essentially designed to find good content, not to favour sites that follow set rules -- all the bad things are stuff most people wouldn't do anyway, and all the good things are far far less important than having good content. I cringe slightly when I see posts like this on here, because it's so easy for non-technical people to get the wrong end of the stick and start chasing something that is, to all intents and purposes, entirely irrelevant, like switching your site to SSL -- yes, it makes a tiny tiny difference, but compared to actually sitting down and writing more content, it's several orders of magnitude less effective.