We have recently launched a new website for the leading training company Olive Strachan. Olive Strachan are a global training company with headquarters in Manchester; they have a wealth of experience in management training, leadership training, customer services training and other similar business centric disciplines.

We first worked with Olive Strachan back in 2006 when we developed a site called Training Manchester (Training Manchester)for them. This site is still useful if a little dated, but now Olive Strachan wanted something a little more up to date and more in tune with their current business model, particularly as it has changed over the past 5 years. We designed a new website for them and it can be found at Olive Strachan.

We have just launched a new website for Inklusive who are a specialist ink cartridge replacement company. If you are looking for a ink cartridge replacement then we thoroughly recommend taking a look at this website.

Carl and Jason have recently returned from a trip to Germany to visit a company called Parador, who they visited with one of our clients Westco Floors (Western Cork Limited). The purpose of the visit was both to become more familiar with the flooring products supplied by Parador and to check out a software implementation in place at Parador which includes a sophisticated floor designer that they have also implemented online.

The showroom at Parador was very impressive, as was the efforts that they have put into their floor designer software. This new floor designer software is great and has been made available online via their website, offline via a disk, and also through a clever POS system for flooring showrooms. If you want to read more about Parador and their products and services we recommend that you also visit Living Performance.

Westco are large flooring wholesaler for the UK and also have a very impressive business; they are already working closely with Parador and are working on plans to supply more of the Parador products. The Parador software that we are looking at with Westco is not quite capable yet of implementing in a bespoke fashion as it cannot yet be implemented with a selection of flooring products, so at the moment it's all or nothing, but with a little work we can get this software implemented for Westco here in the UK and we will be working on this over the coming months.

Firstly, what do we mean by the term duplicate content? The web savvy will no doubt be familiar with the term and understand the impact it can have on your website optimisation campaign. But what about the SEO novices ? The last thing you want to do is invest heavily in a website, only for your website optimisation efforts to be hampered by duplicate content.

Duplicate content is content which appears on more than one web page or URL. The problem arises when the search engines attempt to index the site, as they are unable to decipher which version of the text is most relevant to a given search query. This is a real flaw in any website optimisation strategy, as, in an attempt to show only the most relevant search results, search engines rarely show multiple, duplicated pieces of content. As a result, they are forced to determine which piece is most likely to be original, which is far from a simple process.

So exactly why does duplicate content cause the search engines so much trouble, and ultimately undermine your website optimisation strategy?

  • Search engines are unsure which version of the content is the original, and as such it is difficult to determine which to index and display in search results.
  • Search engines are unable to determine whether to directly link metrics such as trust, authority, anchor text etc to one page, or to separate it between multiple versions.
  • Further difficulties are posed when search engines decide which version of the content to rank for search results.

Okay, so duplicate content is not good for an organisation’s website optimisation campaign for the above reasons. But what types of duplicate content issues can arise?

  • Printer-friendly versions – versions of content which are printer friendly are more likely to cause duplicate content issues when multiple versions of pages are indexed due to the duplicate content present.
  • URL parameters – some URL parameters such as click tracking as well as certain analytics codes may cause issues with duplicate content.
  • Session IDs – this is one of the most frequent causes of duplicate content issues and can undermine even the most comprehensive website optimisation campaign. Problems occur when each user visiting a website is assigned a different session ID which is stored in the URL.

If you are confused about any further issues with duplicate content then contact Designer Websites, the website optimisation specialists. Call us on 0845 272 6813 today.  

We first developed a website for modelmakers back in 2008, at which point we concentrated on getting the website highly ranked within the search engines for terms like architectural model makers, exhibition models, fibreglass models and various other keywords. The site took a little while to get high positions but not outranks all competition and has been on page 1, in positions 1 to 3, for a couple of years now. Having achieved the ultimate goal Steve the owner now wanted to bring the style of the website up to date so that we could not only drive the traffic to the site but also impress the potential clients with an attractive and informative website. The latest version on the modelmakers website can be found here: Modelmakers.

This new website for Modelmakers also includes a blog, which allows the company to show off their model making skills, and gives them the flexibility to add new content anytime they want.