The SEO of Multiple Channel Publishing

Backlinks

Backlinks, which are links somewhere out there on the Internet that point back to your website, are regarded as the most important thing when it comes to SEO. All others—including URL structure, duplicate content concerns and so on—are far less important than backlinks. With buuteeq, we publish your content, that you can access and edit at any time, to your Facebook page and free Wandari listing, which generates backlinks to your website.

Consistent Content

One of the hurdles property owners have had a hard time overcoming is keeping their property’s constantly evolving information up-to-date on all their marketing channels. Maybe your phone number changes, your promotions change or you offer a new service—you need the ability to quickly and easily update all your marketing channels to reflect these changes. Enter buuteeq, which gives you the power to do so with the push of one button.

Now that your content is consistent across all your marketing channels, I’ll briefly explain how this process works in terms of hotel SEO. Google and other search engines want unique content on every page. They don’t want you making a dozen pages that have identical content. Therefore, they have an algorithm that checks for identical content on your website so they can offer browsers the best content you have.

However, they don’t penalize you if you have identical content, as Google discusses in this article. Here’s a quote from Google on the issue:

“Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a ‘duplicate content penalty.’”

Instead, Google will poorly rank websites that ‘scrape’ other websites, steal their content and publish it as their own. They never harm the ranking of the website that originally published the content, as they explain in this article.

“This simply leads to further processes with the intent of determining the original source of the content—something Google is quite good at, as in most cases the original content can be correctly identified, resulting in no negative effects for the site that originated the content.”

What does this mean for the innkeeper? Simply, if you have identical content on your own website on multiple pages, change it. It is easy to do this by logging into buuteeq’s BackOffice and using our intuitive article editor. If someone copies your content and publishes it as their own, it won’t hurt you. While it may be frustrating, Google is smart enough to know that your website is the original owner.

Consistant Content – Don’t Be Afraid

Google is smart enough to understand that in some cases consistent content is necessary, like when you want to provide a printer-friendly version of some content, when you have a consistent signature at the end of every blog post you write, when you quote someone in a blog post when responding to his comment–and so on. As Google says on their definitive article about this issue that is updated on an ongoing bases (which you can read here on their blog) webmasters should only be concerned about consistent content when pages share “largely identical content”.

Additionally, when Google sees content that links back to the original source, it understands that the original source is the source of the content, and will not penalize the source. In buuteeq’s case, both our free Facebook app and Wandari link back to your website–the content source. (Google explains this on the page linked above under the “Syndicate Carefully” section).This quote from Google should alleviate any duplicate content concerns:

“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”

When you publish consistent content to web, mobile and social channels with buuteeq, you are making it easier for guests to access up-to-date information about your property. Also, you are generating SEO friendly backlinks to your website. Google knows that your website is the content source, so even if the text you placed on your Facebook app and Wandari listing is identical to text on your website, your website will not be penalized by Google. If you’re still concerned, you can always login to buuteeq’s BackOffice and change anything you wish so it is similar, but not identical, to your website content.

Here’s a great video by Google’s Matt Cutts who explains Google’s philosophy on duplicate content.

Here are more sources for further reading for the curious:

• http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359
• http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content