Usability Consultancy, Website Reviews, Website Optimisation

Is it just this industry or does every industry have it's forums where so called experts make life more complicated and confusing than it needs to be?

It's frightening when you read the conflicting advice in the SEO forums, no wonder businesses don't have a clue where to start, what is solid advice, what is pure speculation, what is rumour and what come from the 'horses mouth'. Notice how I avoided the term 'bull-sh!t'... It wasn't easy.

A perfect example – Duplicate Content:

We all agree that duplicate content is a bad thing. Its bad in several ways but mainly because Google, MSN and Yahoo do not like to be fooled by a website that has duplicate content – primarily Google. Google is very clever at detecting duplicate content and, as a website owner, you would get less pages indexed than you expected because of the detected duplicates.

So it's pointless doing it.

So the other day I was reading a supposedly 'authoritative' SEO Forum where someone had asked the question about duplicate titles, duplicate description tags and duplicate content – the main question being what impact it would have in Google.

Amazingly, I read 3 or 4 SEO Experts give different opinions. How can that be?

If duplicate content is wrong, it's wrong. There's no grey areas, no maybes, no 'yeah buts' – it's wrong – simple as that. Duplicate content is cheating. It's black hat. It is wrong. Even pages that are almost the same, eg promoting a service or product to two geographic areas via two pages – the content wouldn't be identical – you'd have to specify your market for that page and therefore making each page unique. You'd also change the keywords and description to include the target market of each page, again, making each page unique.

But these guys were discussing 100% duplicate pages. Same content, same descriptions, same keywords.

Now how can that be acceptable? It can't.

The question I started out with on this article is how can you find quality advice when even the so called SEO Experts disagree. Does that mean that only a few of them are actually telling their clients what is right and the rest of them leading their clients down the garden path of black-hat SEO?

Frightening isn't it. Not knowing which "SEO Expert" to believe.