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by seanwilson 2339 days ago
> Most of the time you will see people talking about keywords, and keywords tools.

> We like tools, so we start using them, spending days to get the maximum value out of the free ones, spending a lot of time.

> Right? Wrong.

> I have a confession to make: I never used a keyword tool. I do not currently use one, and I find that just thinking about it bores me.

I don't use keyword tools myself but I do think on-page/technical SEO is important. You're not going to rank well on Google with perfect on-page SEO + awful content but if you've got well written content then good on-page SEO can only help. On-page SEO helps Google understand the content better.

I have my own project/tool that checks technical SEO [1] where I've intentionally stayed away from adding any checks/recommendations that aren't backed up by something Google says. I avoid any advice that's based on trying to reverse engineer however Google search works today that could change tomorrow.

For example, I recommend every site is checked for broken links (it's easy to miss broken internal links as you make changes), badly named URLs, missing image ALT tags and duplicate pages+titles (this one is really ease to miss without a crawling tool). You can still rank well even if your site has these problems but SEO fixes like these can only help. Obviously you need to prioritise fixes against time you could spend writing more content but there's a lot of low hanging fruit with on-page SEO.

[1] Rules checked are here https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/

1 comments

> duplicate content

On the same website or across the web (or a network) ?

edit: ah, from the page you linked

> Every page should provide unique content that doesn’t appear elsewhere on the site. Search engines will penalise or even completely hide pages that are too similar as showing duplicate search results is unhelpful to users. Duplicate pages can also reduce the search rank benefit of backlinks because it’s better to have backlinks to a single URL compared to backlinks spread over a set of duplicate page URLs. Crawling duplicates will also use up the resources search crawlers allocate to crawling your site which means important pages might not be indexed. You can eliminate sets of duplicate pages by consolidating them to a single URL using redirects or canonical tags.

The guide from https://www.checkbot.io/guide/seo/ is focused on technical/on-page SEO but Google makes some mentions of how it treats duplicate content across the web here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

> Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. ...

> Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one of them to list.

> In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved.