Timothy Carter

If you don’t know the importance of a great domain name yet, then you’ve been missing out. Domain names send a message and set the tone for your brand and your business. Not only that, selecting the right one can be quite lucrative both in practice and if you ever decide to sell it. That doesn’t mean just anything will work however, there are a number of dos and don’ts when it comes to creating a domain name. If you want a truly great one that will make your brand recognizable, you’ll want to follow some of the key strategies that we’re going to go over here in this guide. Not only tell you about the most expensive domains ever sold, but we’re also going to enlighten you on just what makes them great, and how to capture some of that greatness for yourself so that you too can make the most of the internet. Creating a Great Domain Name For Yourself Domains do more than just name your website, they represent your brand, your products, and your intentions as a business. Creating a great domain name is more than just picking something catchy that folks can remember, though that is part of it in some cases. Your first consideration should be the top-level domain (TLD) you choose. You may already know this, but TLDs have a trust hierarchy to them. Not only is there a trust hierarchy, but there is less recognition the further you go down the list of top-level domains. Knowing which ones are the most trusted and recognizable by users is likely your first step to creating an outstanding domain name of your own. Try a .Com Name First The top of the TLD heap in the United States is the .com domain. While other countries typically use a shortened abbreviation of their country’s name, such as .jp for Japan and .ca for Canada, for some strange reason, that trait never took in the United States. This means that if you’re looking for the most trustworthy and recognizable top-level domain you can get, then .com is the one you look for first. The hierarchy of trust trends downward from there in the United States, but if you’re looking to do business in another country, such as China for instance, then you want a domestic domain to facilitate marketing and growth in that market. It can be tougher for U.S. websites to rank in other countries, particularly those where search engines perform differently than the Google we are all used to. The best domains are usually .com domains but all is not lost if you cannot get one. Just be mindful that the further down the list of TLDs you go, the less trustworthy they are considered. Some industry-specific TLDs like .tv fair well because they are relevant to the business or entity they are attached to. This is similar to the domains .org and .edu which are tied to specific entities. Keep it Simple Like we’ve talked about, the name you choose matters a lot in terms of whether your domain has value. It has to be easy to remember, relevant and relatable. It must also do this in as few characters as possible. Think of it from a logical perspective using real-world examples. Google is only six letters (not including the TLD) your bank, social media, and other things are all under ten characters. There’s a valid reason behind this. Users don’t want long complicated names, they want things that are easy to remember and that signify something to them. You wouldn’t name your website antidisestablismentarianism.com and expect folks to remember it or want to type it into a search bar either. Users don’t like special characters either. The rule of thumb is simple words that have meaning and are ten letters or less. If you can stick to this formula and still display your brand, then you’re on track to having a great domain name like the ones on our list later in this guide. On Brand is Best Your domain name can be considered something of a signifier of what you do. Say, for instance, that you sold shoes, if you owned the domain shoes.com, chances are this would be a popular domain, it would be valued highly, and more importantly, people would know exactly what they are getting when they click. However, if you sell tires and you own shoes.com then you might want to consider selling that domain, because not only is it not on-brand for your business, you’re likely to wind up with some seriously confused and aggravated users. When we say “on brand”, we mean, relevant to what you do. If you can’t get a name that says exactly what you do in a word, then another descriptor may work too. For example, to go back to shoes, if you can’t get shoes.com then you can try other synonyms such as footwear.com. This still gets the point across of what you do, it ticks the box of ten letters, and it’s easy to remember. Don’t Steal We probably don’t need to say this, but we will anyway, check before you register. No, we’re not talking about hotel check-in, we’re talking about registering your domain name. Just because a particular name isn’t taken under a particular TLD doesn’t mean it isn’t a copyrighted brand name that someone else is using. Companies will often trademark terms related to their business without actually establishing a domain name associated with it. Do your homework and don’t infringe on anyone else’s rights in the process of building your brand. A trademark fight is not something a business wants to deal with. The Most Expensive Domain Names Ever Sold For this list, we’re ranking them by the actual dollar amount they sold for, not for how good or bad the name is. Along with each name, we’ll describe why it sold for that amount. 1. Business.com – $345 Million Yes, you are in fact reading

Your organic website traffic is typically derived from one of the following sources: Direct Traffic – someone keying-in your website URL without finding you through another means Referral Traffic – a broad channel that includes social, news, blogs, etc. Email Traffic – traffic from your cold and subscribed email campaigns Social Traffic – a more narrow referral channel that could include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Paid Traffic – could include PPC services for Google, Facebook, etc. Organic Traffic – derived from a search on Google or even Bing AI Traffic – traffic from ChatGPT (now Chat.com) and other generative AI engines Of all the sources of traffic online–when it works properly–organic traffic is the most efficient and scalable, regardless of your company’s stage of growth. It is also relatively inexpensive compared to some of the other traffic sources. One of the most important concepts associated with SEO to drive organic search traffic is the number of people visiting your site from search engines and their associated stickiness or “dwell time”. But what exactly is organic traffic, and how does it work in the context of SEO? Let’s dive in! What is Organic Traffic? Organic traffic, put simply, is traffic that comes from Google and other search engines’ search engine results pages (SERPs). Think of it this way; you search for a given topic, like “bike repair shops,” and you see a list of search results. You click on one of those results to visit the brand’s website. You now count as an organic visitor and will be included as part of the brand’s total organic traffic. Source: Google As much as 53.3 percent of all traffic on the web comes from organic search, so it’s one of the most valuable channels to capitalize on. How to Increase Organic Traffic Because organic traffic is valuable, working toward growing it can be extremely beneficial for overall sales and revenue. While there are industry, promotional and platform nuances to increase organic traffic, the fundamentals are industry agnostic: Create Phenomenal Content. If you want to outrank big companies for particular keywords, you need to create content that is leagues above competitors looking to rank their web pages for your same keywords. Promote Your Phenomenal Content. While simple in principle, this is the very essence of the difficulty of SEO and link building. Content can be promoted through email, but the outreach should lead to backlinks and brand mentions from other relevant quality websites. We cover how to garner more organic traffic to your website in our Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing here. Why Is Organic Traffic Valuable? Source: Ahrefs Why all the fuss about organic traffic? Well, for starters, all traffic to your website is good for your site, generally speaking. If your site has a 2 percent conversion rate and you make $150 on average per sale, the difference between 1,000 visitors and 10,000 visitors is the difference between $3,000 and $30,000 in revenue. Increasing your organic traffic will increase your total revenue (and help you achieve your other goals). Organic traffic is especially relevant for two main reasons: 1. It’s relevant. By increasing your organic rankings for relevant keyword terms and avoiding optimization for irrelevant terms, you can control the types of people who visit you organically. In other words, you can make sure your visitors are within your target demographics and at the right phase of the buying cycle. 2. It’s (somewhat) within your control. Technically, it’s possible to increase organic traffic numbers in any category, but more organic traffic to your website is especially accessible thanks to SEO. Organic Traffic as Part of SEO Source: Google Analytics Let’s take a closer look at how organic traffic functions as a byproduct of an SEO campaign. SEO, in case you aren’t familiar, is a combination of different strategies and tactics, all of which are intended to increase your rankings in search engines. These can be broadly categorized as followed: High-level strategy. First, you’ll have to consider your high-level strategy. For example, do you want to avoid competition by targeting local keywords, or compete on a national level? Which demographics are you targeting? Will you use a combination of head keywords and long-tail phrases? If so, which ones are most important? Keyword research is vital at this stage. Technical on page SEO. There are many technical factors that can influence how your site ranks (and how it functions for your users). Generally, Google and other search engines reward sites that are built efficiently and according to best practices. Sites that load quickly, sites that are mobile optimized, and sites that are easy to crawl all have a massive advantage, such that technical optimization is a practical prerequisite if you want any chance of ranking. Onsite content. You’ll also need a consistent stream of high-quality onsite content. This will help you build authority for your website, and simultaneously allow you to target specific keywords and phrases. These pages also serve as material that can rank in SERPs. Link building and offsite content. Link building, often with the help of offsite content, allows you to earn and construct links pointing back to your domain, increasing your authority (and therefore your capacity to rank). It’s also a way to generate referral traffic. While it’s technically possible to optimize for search engines without link building, for most brands, it’s a practical necessity if you want to rank. For more on link building checkout our Link Builder’s Guide to SEO. There are literally more than 200 ranking signals that Google uses to formulate organic search results, so consider these high-level assessments as just the tip of the iceberg. As you follow these SEO strategies, you’ll increase your domain authority and page-level authority—trustworthiness scores that let Google and other search engines know you’re worth ranking. You’ll also increase your relevance for specific keywords and phrases. Over time, you’ll rank higher for those terms when people search for them. The higher you rank, the better, with sharply diminishing returns

As a criminal lawyer, you want to help your potential clients – and you also want to grow your client base. To do that, you need more visibility. And in today’s largely digital world, the best way to achieve more visibility is to earn higher rankings in search engines like Google. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the way to do it. But how exactly does SEO for criminal lawyers work? And how should you practice it? Why Choose SEO as a Criminal Defense Lawyer? First, why would you choose SEO as your primary marketing strategy as a criminal lawyer? SEO is a way of getting your name and your law firm’s website higher and more visible in search engine results pages (SERPs). These days, when people have criminal law problems, they often turn to the internet first. They search for things like “felony defense” and misdemeanor defense,” looking for criminal defense lawyers like you who can help them with information and consultations. When you rank higher, you get more visibility and traffic. With more visibility and traffic, it’s only natural that you’ll attract more potential clients. SEO is advantageous not only because It helps you generate more traffic and revenue, but also because it’s relatively inexpensive. Building a solid lawyer SEO strategy does require investment and patience, but with the right strategy, it can pay off enormously. The Big Picture: Your Criminal Defense Law SEO Strategy SEO is a long-term strategy designed to help you gradually build authority and rise to the top of the rankings. Broadly speaking, you’ll need to focus on both the trustworthiness/authoritativeness of your website and the relevance of your website to your target demographics. In pursuit of this, you’ll need to invest in and develop at least the following elements:       Strategy. First, you need a direction for your marketing strategy for your criminal defense law firm. There are many criminal defense lawyers competing for the top slots of Google, so how are you going to stand apart? And how are you going to make sure you see a positive return on investment (ROI)? Keyword research and competitive research are critical for your success here.       Technical onsite SEO. If you want to rise to the top of Google’s rankings, your website needs to be technically polished. Your website should be SEO friendly and user friendly, with excellent performance metrics.       Onsite content development. Content has long been the heart of SEO, and it should still be the foundation of your criminal defense law SEO strategy. It’s an opportunity to not only optimize for specific keywords but also show off your authority and expertise.       Offsite content and link building. You’ll also need to think about link building and, by extension, offsite content development. Links function as votes of confidence in the eyes of Google and other search engines; the more links you have and the more powerful those links are, the more authoritative you’ll be seen to be. However, you need to build links in natural ways that are valuable to users. To this end, one of the best strategies you can use is offsite content development.       Analysis and adjustment. Finally, you’ll need to spend time analyzing your performance metrics and adjusting your approach. Tweaking pages, tweaking keyword choices, and iteratively advancing your strategy will lead you to better results in the future. Criminal Defense Law Firm SEO Strategy: Keyword Research and Planning Before you start developing content or building links, you need to spend some time doing research and planning your campaign. One of the most important elements here is to figure out which keywords are going to be most valuable to your criminal law practice. Strong keywords are highly relevant to both your criminal defense lawyer practice and your target audience. They also have relatively high search volume and low competition, as highly contested keywords can often be excessively expensive to pursue. Examples of foundational “head” keywords for a criminal defense law firm SEO strategy include things like:       Felony Defense       Misdemeanor Defense       Prosecution       White-Collar Crime       Drug Offenses       Violent Crimes However, it’s also a good idea to optimize for long tail keyword phrases, like “how to find a good criminal lawyer.” Long tail phrases are longer, less commonly searched, and much less competitive when compared to head keywords. In the most competitive niches, like SEO for personal injury law, the long tail is the way to go. Ideally, you’ll have a list of at least a dozen target keywords with which you can begin your criminal defense marketing campaign. Technical Onsite SEO for Criminal Defense Lawyers Technical onsite SEO is a collection of tactics designed to make your website more functional, better for users, and more polished in the eyes of Google. Technically optimized websites have a distinct advantage over their poorly optimized counterparts in criminal defense SEO. These are some of the most important items to consider.       Indexing/discoverability. Before your website can appear in Google Search results, it must be crawled (by Google’s web-crawling bots) and indexed. Accordingly, you need to make sure that your website is accessible and easy for Google to crawl. If there’s anything blocking Google from crawling or indexing your website, it’s not going to be able to rank.       Navigation and page organization. You should pay close attention to your page organization and internal navigation, as Google prioritizes intuitively structured websites. For example, you might have a “Criminal Defense” section of your website with pages like “Felony Defense,” “Misdemeanor Defense,” “White-Collar Crime,” “Drug Offenses,” and “Violent Crimes” under it. You could have a separate section for “Prosecution,” with separate relevant pages underneath it.       Page speed optimization. Faster websites tend to rank higher than slower websites, so you’ll need to spend at least some time on page speed optimization. Even

Defined simply, content marketing is: 1. The Creation of Quality Content  2. The Promotion of Quality Content  In this, step-by-step, all-in-one guide to planning and launching a content marketing strategy you will learn that good content marketing strategy includes both on and off-site content creation and on and off-site content promotion. And they’re almost never mutually exclusive. For instance, video content marketing for Youtube would fit into both the created and promoted buckets. You might create a quality blog post and then promote it by PR and link building outreach, then create more content off-site to link back to your original post. In reality, content marketing may more appropriately look like this: The who, what, when, where why and how you create and promote your content is how one develops the ideal content marketing strategy for success. In order to create and promote, you need to understand your ideal customer persona, where they are online and how to promote to them. In other words, you will need to have the necessary skills to be an adept content marketer. Only then will you gain a true edge or competitive advantage. For instance, a Shopify ecommerce store will have a very different creation and promotion strategy than a local tax attorney or tax service business. How to Plan Your Content Marketing Strategy There are some important reasons why you should plan a content strategy—by which I mean a formally written document—that outlines your plans for success. According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, there are four main factors responsible for differentiating self-described “successful” content marketers from self-described “unsuccessful” content marketers. (Image Source: Content Marketing Institute) The Content “Research Phase” Let’s move on to the actual steps you’ll need to take to draft your content strategy. First, you’re going to need raw information. Remember what I said about needing to have more objective information, rather than relying on your own assumptions and instincts? This is the stage of the process you’ll use to get that information. There are several types of research you’ll need to perform, each with their own challenges and tactics. Your end goal is to walk away with enough raw material and data to inform your strategic decisions. When doing content marketing research, you can use keyword research tools or the unique data provided from organizations like Content Marketing Institute. Let’s take a look at some of the most important research areas: Market research Market research is what you’ll use to identify and understand your target audience. Your target audience will be the ones reading your content, supporting it through social sharing, and eventually becoming customers. Hopefully, you already have a solid idea of who your clearly defined audience is—but don’t make assumptions yet. Take your time evaluating different demographics and how they might relate to your brand and already have brand awareness based on your content marketing. There are several ways you can do this; for example, you can rely on government-drawn census data to learn more about the buying habits and dispositions of your key demographics (and demographics you may not have previously considered), or you can leverage recent industry studies or market research companies to dig deeper into more specific information. Google Trends and Content Marketing Institute are great tools for engaging in custom research on trending keywords as well as research insight from articles on the company website. Device usage You’ll also need to pay attention to what types of devices your target audience is going to be using. For the most part, you’ll find that there’s a great diversity here. More users are opting for multi-platform access to content, switching between desktop devices, tablets, and smartphones throughout the day. Image Source: ComScore (via smartinsights.com) Still, you’ll find that your demographics and your industry likely favor one device more than the others. You’ll need to make your content compatible with all devices, but you might bear one in mind more than the others. Preferred media types Don’t neglect things like images, videos, and audio streams. Beyond that, there are multiple methods of serving these mediums, such as various channels and file types, and many formatting variables, such as length and overall presentation. Most content marketing strategies will benefit from using multiple of these media types simultaneously, but the only way to figure out which ones are best for you (and your audience) is to research it. Competitive research Competitive research adds another layer of sophistication to your research phase. So far, you’ve been researching what audience segments you’ll be focusing on and what types of content they might like to see. This is good information, but it’s all theoretical. Competitive research helps you see content marketing in a live environment—and in your niche, no less. Make a list of your direct and indirect competitors, and take a look at what they’re doing for their own content marketing campaigns. Keyword research Keyword research is specifically done for SEO, though even if you don’t plan on investing heavily in an independent SEO campaign, it’s worth doing. Here, your goal is to uncover various keywords and keyword phrases that might serve as good targets for content topics. (Image Source: ahrefs) Again, keep any keyword insights you find here in balance; your primary goal is to produce good content. Write for readers, not for search engines. Setting Content Marketing Goals & Establishing a Timeline Once you’ve done enough research to give you a broad understanding of your clearly defined audience, your competitive position, and your niche, you can start drawing up the main goals of your campaign—as well as a timeline in which you’ll meet those goals. The long-term nature of content marketing Before you get too ambitious, you need to realize the long-term nature of content marketing. You can’t use content marketing as a get-rich-quick scheme, nor can you use it as a short-term boost for your brand awareness. If you’re going to get involved with content, you need to have a long-term focus. Budgetary considerations Ideally,

As a labor and employment lawyer, your goal is to advocate for your clients, ensuring their rights are protected in the workplace. But to do that effectively in today’s digital-first world, you need to be where your potential clients are—online. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the tool that gets you there. By optimizing your website for search engines like Google, you increase your visibility, which leads to more traffic, and ultimately, more clients. So, how do you make SEO work for you as a labor and employment lawyer? Why Labor and Employment Lawyers Need SEO First, let’s look at why SEO for employment lawyers should be your go-to marketing strategy. When people face workplace issues like discrimination, wage disputes, or wrongful termination, they often start their search for help online. They type in queries like “employment lawyer near me” or “help with workplace harassment,” and the search results display a list of lawyers who can assist them. If your employment law firm ranks higher in the search engine results pages, potential clients are more likely to click on your website and reach out to you for help. Law firm SEO helps you capture that traffic by boosting your site’s ranking for relevant searches. And here’s the beauty of SEO: it’s a cost-effective, long-term strategy. While it does require an upfront investment of time and resources, once your website is optimized and starts ranking, you can enjoy a steady stream of organic traffic. Compare that to paid advertising, which only works as long as you keep putting cash into the “machine”, and you’ll quickly see the value of SEO. 5 Components of an SEO Strategy for Labor and Employment Lawyers SEO isn’t a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing effort that involves various tactics to improve your website’s visibility. Here’s how to structure your SEO strategy to ensure you’re reaching the right people. Strategic Planning and Keyword Research Before diving into creating content or tweaking your website, you need a plan. This starts with keyword research. Think about what your potential clients are searching for. Your goal is to identify the terms and phrases most relevant to labor and employment law and your specific niche. Some basic employment law firm keyword ideas might include: Wrongful termination lawyer Workplace discrimination attorney Employment contract review Wage and hour disputes Harassment and retaliation claims Employment Contracts Wage and Hour Disputes Discrimination Workplace Safety Employment Benefits Immigration employment law These broad “head” keywords are competitive, but they’re crucial because they define the core of what you do and can set you apart from other employment law firms. However, don’t stop there. You’ll also want to target long-tail keywords, which are more specific and less competitive, like: “How to sue my employer for discrimination” “Can I sue my boss for unpaid wages?” “How can I protect my company against a frivolous employment lawsuit?” By targeting a mix of both, you can cast a wide net while also capturing niche searches with less competition. 2. On-Page SEO and Technical Optimization Once you know which keywords to target, the next step is ensuring your website is optimized for search engines. This means making sure Google can crawl your site easily, your content is relevant to search queries, and the user experience is top-notch. Here’s how to tackle the most critical aspects of on-page SEO: Page Titles and Meta Descriptions: Every page on your site should have a clear, keyword-focused title tag and meta description. These are the snippets of text that appear in search results and help Google and potential clients understand what the page is about. For instance, if you have a page about wage disputes, make sure the title includes “Wage Disputes Lawyer” and your location if you’re targeting local traffic. URL Structure: Keep your URLs short and relevant. A page focused on wrongful termination should have a URL like: /wrongful-termination-lawyer. This not only looks cleaner but also signals to search engines what the page is about. Internal Linking: Make sure your pages are interconnected with internal links. If someone is reading about wage disputes, link them to related content on workplace harassment or your contact page for easy navigation. Page Speed and Mobile Optimization: A slow website can hurt your SEO efforts. If your pages take too long to load, users will bounce, and Google will penalize you for it. Invest in page speed optimization techniques like compressing images, enabling browser caching, and using a content delivery network (CDN). And don’t forget mobile optimization! Most people are searching on their phones these days, so make sure your site is mobile-friendly. 3. Creating High-Quality, Relevant Content In SEO, content is king, and that’s especially true for labor and employment lawyers. The more valuable content you create, the more opportunities you have to rank for relevant keywords and build trust with potential clients. Here’s how to approach content creation: Targeted Blog Posts: One of the best ways to rank for long-tail keywords is to write blog posts answering common legal questions. Topics like “What to do if you’re fired without cause” or “How to handle workplace retaliation” can help you capture traffic from people actively seeking legal advice. Make sure each post is thorough, answering the question in depth, and includes your target keywords naturally throughout. Practice Area Pages: Don’t neglect the core pages of your website. You should have individual pages dedicated to each practice area, such as wrongful termination, wage disputes, or discrimination cases. These pages should include detailed information about the services you offer, relevant legal insights, and clear calls to action. Local SEO Content: Since legal services are often local, you’ll want to include location-based keywords in your content. For example, optimize pages for searches like “employment lawyer in [City Name]” or “labor attorney near me.” Showing Expertise: Google’s algorithm favors content that shows E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). As a lawyer, your content must reflect your legal expertise. Use your blog and practice area pages to show your knowledge of

Duplicate content can be bad. Using the same content, either in total or partial form, on your website leads to a poor user experience, and triggers a red flag in Google’s search algorithm. In the old days of SEO, duplicate content was often used as a cheap trick to get more keywords and more content on a website, so Google evolved a system to weed out the spammers who violated best practices by doing this. Today, if you’re caught using duplicate content, your domain authority could suffer and your keyword rankings could drop. In this post we discuss: What is duplicate content? Why is it bad? Content syndication & duplicate content What other content production tools can cause duplicate content? Types of duplicate content. Which are benign, which are toxic. How does Generative AI (artificial intelligence) content fit into the mix? How to avoid and/or clean up duplicate content Duplicate Content Defined In the vast majority of cases, duplicate content is non-malicious and simply a product of whichever CMS (content management system) the website happens to be running on. For example, WordPress (the industry-standard CMS) automatically creates “Category” pages and “tag” duplicate pages which list all blog posts within certain categories or tags. Or, the www vs.ur non-www version of a site may not be redirected properly, causing duplicate content from multiple URLs. This creates multiple pages or URL parameters within the domain that contain the same content. 1) Google may decide to let me off with a “warning” and simply choose not to index 99 of my 100 duplicate posts, but keep one of them indexed. NOTE: This doesn’t mean my website’s search rankings would be affected in any way by the duplicate content. 2) Google may decide it’s such a blatant attempt at gaming the system that it completely de-indexes my entire website from all search results. This means that, even if you searched directly for “Example.com” Google would find no results. So, one of those two scenarios is guaranteed to happen. Which one it is depends on how egregious Google determines your blunder to be. In Google’s own words: Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the pages with duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a canonical version of the content to show in a given search result. This type of non-malicious duplication is fairly common, especially since many CMSs don’t handle this well by default. So when people say that having this type of duplicate content can affect your site, it’s not because you’re likely to be penalized; it’s simply due to the way that web sites and search engines work. Most search engines strive for a certain level of variety; they want to show you ten different results on a search results page, not ten different URLs that all have the same content. To this end, Google tries to filter out duplicate content and documents so that users experience less redundancy. So, what happens when a search engine crawler detects duplicate content? (from https://searchengineland.com/search-illustrated-how-a-search-engine-determines-duplicate-content-13980) How to Find Duplicate Content Fixing duplicate content is relatively easy. Finding duplicate content is the hard part. Like I mentioned above, duplicate content can be tricky to detect—just because you don’t have any repeated content from a user experience perspective doesn’t mean you don’t have repeated content from a search algorithm’s perspective. Your first step is a manual one; go through your site and see if there are any obvious repetitions of content. As an example, do you have an identical paragraph concluding each of the pages on your site? Rewrite it. Did you re-use a section of a past blog post in a new post? Make a distinction. Once you’ve completed this initial manual scan, there are two main tools you can use to find more, better hidden instances of duplicate content. Perform Your Own Search First, you can perform a search to see through Google’s eyes. Use a Site: tag to restrict your search to your site only, and follow up with an intitle: tag to search for a specific phrase. It should look a little something like this: Site:thisisyoursite.comintitle:”thisisyourtargetphrase” This search will generate all the results on your given site that correlate to your chosen phrase. If you see multiple identical results, you know you have a duplicate content problem. Check Google Search Console (GSC) A simpler way to check for duplicate content is to use Google Webmaster Tools to crawl your site and report back on any errors. Once you’ve created and verified your Webmaster Tools account, head to the Search Appearance tab and click on “HTML Improvements.” Here, you’ll be able to see and download a list of duplicate meta descriptions and title tags. These are common and easily fixable issues that just require a bit of time to rewrite. To determine whether a sample of duplicate content is going to pull down your rankings, first you have to determine why you are going to publish such content in the first place. It all boils down to your purpose. If your goal is to try to punk the system by using a piece of content that has been published elsewhere, you’re bound to get penalized. The purpose is clearly deceptive and intended to manipulate search results. This is what Google has to say about this sort of behavior: 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. Copyscape For 5 cents per search, you can have Copyscape vet an entire piece for you. But if your budget won’t allow that kind of expenditure, you can still use Copyscape for free. The catch with free Copyscape is that you’ll have to