Google Duplicate Content Penalties Revisited
By Miles Evans
A few Google updates ago one of my review websites went from top placement in Google and friends to 50th over night. Yahoo, MSN and the rest were unchanged. As it turns out one of the test domains I own was pointing to the server with the review site and tripping up Google's duplicate content filter. A year of hard work SEO'ing seemed flushed down the toilet. Now the problem has since corrected itself but I have never achieved that top ranking on Google again from this rookie mistake.
TIP: In apache the first container you make in httpd.conf will be the default website shown. For that reason I now make this initial entry a 'COMING SOON' type of page with links to some of my other projects.
Google's duplicate content filter is one of the most speculated and pondered about black hole's in SEO discussion today. One of the biggest anomalies is why the other big search boys do not employ similar tactics. Does Google have it wrong?
Yesterday as I was plowing through the days feeds I came across a really interesting experiment conducted by Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy at SEOChat that looked into this further. Here is a blurb:
"Initially, there were 14 sites that featured the article, including my own. Within a few weeks, that number grew to approximately 19,000 or so sites, which also contained my website, which was the actual origin of the content. Then after about 5 or 6 weeks, the number of sites featuring the article fell to 46 sites. What's aggravating is that my site, which was the source of the original content, was not included anywhere in the search results for this article title."
So the content filter works by eliminating from its rankings content which it deems is not original. But as Jennifer and SEO'ers across the web point out is this is clearly not always an accurate process. In fact if you are submitting articles on a regular basis and testing your results, you must have noticed this by now. Often if your article is plagerized not only are you penalized for dupe content but the perpetrator is rewarded with a steller ranking. Your ranking! Sadly if you are the original writer of stolen copy and Google decides otherwise, there isn't a whole lot you can do. Any by a whole lot I mean nothing.
So as it stands in 2006 tripping up Google’s duplicate content filter is a guaranteed way to kill your rankings - but for how long? For me it took 7 months to get back on the top page of Google at position number #9. A helluva long tumble from #1 for my very competitive keywords. Many domains never recover.
So how do you avoid this happening to you aside from always writing your own content? The bad news is you can't. The good news is that it is no secret Google works very closely with copyscape.com, the same people who handle their Google Alerts service.
From my research Copyscape seems to trigger when strings of 8-10 words are being repeated. It seems amazing but the service is actually performing a dupe check 'net wide'. Judging from its results, it would appear that the search is not being conducted or calculated in real time but rather may be cached during Google's sandboxing, or once every 1-2 months. The bottom line is that if you suspect a dupe is killing your rankings, and searching for your string of text receives no results on Google AND Copyscape, you can likely rule it out as a cause.
In closing I guess the obvious question is how can Google tackle a problem like plagerism effectively with billions of indexed pages. With so much stock cash at thier disposal you would think they would look at human editors (see the Google Peoplerank Memo Leak) being deployed when duplicate content is detected. I mean if they can throw dollars at insuring their top results pages are not affiliate spam, surely they can do the same against article bandits...
Until then one has to hope that a solution is 'in the lab'
Miles Evans provides indepth reviews on every SEO/marketing or killer app he can get his paws on. His reviews, essays, and tools on SEO, OLM, reporting, and other equally fascinating subjects are normally carried out at ProfitPapers.com - Stop by and check out my free backlinks page.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Miles_Evans
A few Google updates ago one of my review websites went from top placement in Google and friends to 50th over night. Yahoo, MSN and the rest were unchanged. As it turns out one of the test domains I own was pointing to the server with the review site and tripping up Google's duplicate content filter. A year of hard work SEO'ing seemed flushed down the toilet. Now the problem has since corrected itself but I have never achieved that top ranking on Google again from this rookie mistake.
TIP: In apache the first
Google's duplicate content filter is one of the most speculated and pondered about black hole's in SEO discussion today. One of the biggest anomalies is why the other big search boys do not employ similar tactics. Does Google have it wrong?
Yesterday as I was plowing through the days feeds I came across a really interesting experiment conducted by Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy at SEOChat that looked into this further. Here is a blurb:
"Initially, there were 14 sites that featured the article, including my own. Within a few weeks, that number grew to approximately 19,000 or so sites, which also contained my website, which was the actual origin of the content. Then after about 5 or 6 weeks, the number of sites featuring the article fell to 46 sites. What's aggravating is that my site, which was the source of the original content, was not included anywhere in the search results for this article title."
So the content filter works by eliminating from its rankings content which it deems is not original. But as Jennifer and SEO'ers across the web point out is this is clearly not always an accurate process. In fact if you are submitting articles on a regular basis and testing your results, you must have noticed this by now. Often if your article is plagerized not only are you penalized for dupe content but the perpetrator is rewarded with a steller ranking. Your ranking! Sadly if you are the original writer of stolen copy and Google decides otherwise, there isn't a whole lot you can do. Any by a whole lot I mean nothing.
So as it stands in 2006 tripping up Google’s duplicate content filter is a guaranteed way to kill your rankings - but for how long? For me it took 7 months to get back on the top page of Google at position number #9. A helluva long tumble from #1 for my very competitive keywords. Many domains never recover.
So how do you avoid this happening to you aside from always writing your own content? The bad news is you can't. The good news is that it is no secret Google works very closely with copyscape.com, the same people who handle their Google Alerts service.
From my research Copyscape seems to trigger when strings of 8-10 words are being repeated. It seems amazing but the service is actually performing a dupe check 'net wide'. Judging from its results, it would appear that the search is not being conducted or calculated in real time but rather may be cached during Google's sandboxing, or once every 1-2 months. The bottom line is that if you suspect a dupe is killing your rankings, and searching for your string of text receives no results on Google AND Copyscape, you can likely rule it out as a cause.
In closing I guess the obvious question is how can Google tackle a problem like plagerism effectively with billions of indexed pages. With so much stock cash at thier disposal you would think they would look at human editors (see the Google Peoplerank Memo Leak) being deployed when duplicate content is detected. I mean if they can throw dollars at insuring their top results pages are not affiliate spam, surely they can do the same against article bandits...
Until then one has to hope that a solution is 'in the lab'
Miles Evans provides indepth reviews on every SEO/marketing or killer app he can get his paws on. His reviews, essays, and tools on SEO, OLM, reporting, and other equally fascinating subjects are normally carried out at ProfitPapers.com - Stop by and check out my free backlinks page.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Miles_Evans
posted by Christian Gomez at 5:05 PM
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