Originally Posted by petaloid
I have a site about plants, The Seed Site. My Pagerank went down from 5 to 4 a while ago, and nothing changed when I added 100 new plants.
Page rank is all about backlinks... Adding new pages and content will not normally affect it, except that adding a large quantity of new pages will often reduce your PR because the "link juice" coming into your site (from links on external sites) will get split between more pages.
Originally Posted by petaloid
I keep getting these SEO emails,
What do you mean by "SEOemails"?
Originally Posted by petaloid
There is a lot of duplicate HTML code on many of my pages, as they include the same things about different plants or parts of plants. For example, I have a page identifying seeds, which lists them in alphabetical order, which is almost the same as the one about seedlings, or seedpods. Anyone looking at the actual page could see they're different, but a computer looking at code, especially if it's only a bit of code, might see them as all the same.
I did look on Google help forums, and I wonder if I need to make a Sitemap (which I don't at present know how to do).
Can someone tell me (a) whether it is probable that Google is counting some of my pages as duplicates, and (b) if they are, how can I get round that? If it comes to a choice, I'd rather please my visitors than Google.
Duplicate code on every page will not be treated as duplicate content... All Content Management System run sites tend to produce similar pages (duplicate code), Google is looking at content, not code (when it comes to duplicate content).
Originally Posted by petaloid
I don't want to add ALT to all the pictures, as that would result in a lot more code, and a lot of my visitors come from countries where internet connection is probably slow, but obviously I want Google to include all my pages.
I would recommend adding alt tags, they are useful for seo purposes and they use very little code.