October has just started. Last month Google cleared their point of view on two so-called SEO factors. One is duplicate content problem & another is using keywords and description meta tags. As you might have found, this blog was down most of the time last month, thanks to the previous hosting! So I thought of updating you quickly on these two things if you have missed.

Google won’t penalize a site for duplicate content. That’s the bottom line. So actually it breaks a general myth as you can say. So what Google actually wants is diversity in results. So if you make some little adjustments your site may also be shown in search results. Otherwise there’s possibility that your site may end up as one of these.

It is a negative effect no doubt. But Google consider that most duplicate content sites are not spam. They have their own methods to detect spam & they banned them for being spam, but not for being duplicate

Now I am coming to meta tags. Here Google confirmed the long time predictions. Google simply don’t consider keywords meta tag in SEO. The reason is simple. It has been abused quite extensively for keyword stuffing to manipulate  SERPs. Suppose, you are targeting keywords that are not in your niche & getting hits for that where users find nothing about the topic. That’s why Google removed it as SEO factor years ago.

In case of description meta tag, it can be useful if Google don’t find a suitable search snippet & will use it instead. Check the above screenshot for an example. But from SEO point of view, it has no effect.

If you want to read the original posts, here is the link for duplicate content & here is for meta tags. They have cool videos attached too. Nowadays Google seem to be publicly releasing more of their point of views on SEO. It is better to know what are going to need to do clearly. When I started it was not like this. If you are a beginner, you are going to like this more