SEO Question

[DaveShoelace]

I was gonna email Kin directly but reckon he would enjoy answering this in public more (and also therefore wouldn't charge me).

As I understand it, when you republish an article online it will hurt your google ranking because it will be too similar (identical in fact) to the previous time you published it. I would like to know, how much do I need to change an article when its republished in order to not hurt the websites google ranking?

I am aware of tools that will tell you how different one page is from the other, but I want to know how different I should be aiming for?

[kinboshi]

Sorry Barry missed this (and must have missed the email too ).

Google will not penalise you for duplicate content. What it will do is select only one of the pages to list and rank, and the other won't come up in the search results. This is probably why people talk of penalties when in fact it makes perfect sense to the user.  I'm assuming the article is being duplicated on the same site?

One way round this if you want the new via version of the same article, on a different URL to be the one google returns on it's search results is to use the canonical link tag. This tells google which of the urls to list, and any links you've got that point to the other url aren't wasted and their benefit is passed on to the preferred url.

Hope that helps.

[DaveShoelace]

It does mate, thank you.

So next question, rather than duplicating the content, what if I 'bump' the same article and make slight amendments - that I assume has no negative effect based on what you are saying?

[kinboshi]

No negative effect at all.  But if you write a new article, you might attract new links to it (from twitter, emails, etc.).  Just make sure you either used the canonical link tag or 301 redirect the old page to the new one.

Where do I send my invoice?