Duplicate Content is Google’s Weak Link

Posted by Grizzly on Jul 16th, 2008 | 115 comments

Many of you are familiar with content scrapers. These people steal your work and post your content on their own sites. Some link back to the original source but many do not. Google maintains that we have little to worry about. In an article on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog in June, Sven Naumann of Google’s Search Quality Team made the following statements.

I’d like to briefly touch on a concern webmasters often voice: in most cases a webmaster has no influence on third parties that scrape and redistribute content without the webmaster’s consent. We realize that this is not the fault of the affected webmaster, which in turn means that identical content showing up on several sites in itself is not inherently regarded as a violation of our webmaster guidelines. 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.

He maintains the following,

Generally, we can differentiate between two major scenarios for issues related to duplicate content:

• Within-your-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content which (often unintentionally) appears in more than one place on your site
• Cross-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content of your site which appears (again, often unintentionally) on different external sites

He tells us that the first scenario can be avoided by including the preferred version of your URLs in your Sitemap file. When encountering different pages with the same content, this may help raise the likelihood of Google serving the version you prefer.

The second scenario is the one most of us are concerned with.

In the second scenario, you might have the case of someone scraping your content to put it on a different site, often to try to monetize it. It’s also common for many web proxies to index parts of sites which have been accessed through the proxy. When encountering such duplicate content on different sites, we look at various signals to determine which site is the original one, which usually works very well. This also means that you shouldn’t be very concerned about seeing negative effects on your site’s presence on Google if you notice someone scraping your content.

From my own experience I am going to tell you that this is horseshit.

The fact is that any site that has more PR and Authority can post all the duplicate content it wants and out rank the original source. How do I know this? For the past 6 months I have been scraping content off of GoArticles for several niche blogs that I had originally built up to PR3 sites with original content. I began scraping snippets from GoArticles and now have several hundred pages of scraped content on these blogs. So what happened to my rankings? 1 Blog is now number 1 in the serp’s for its primary keyword. Two others are on page 1 and three more are hovering between page 1 and 2 in the serp’s. Not a single scraped article ranks lower than the original source – not one. In fact most of the original articles aren’t even found on the serp’s.

What is more interesting is that I have been able to scrape content from some higher PR sites and still outrank the original source with a low PR blog simply by accumulating several decent PR keyword optimized backlinks.

This is not a call for you to start scraping content. I simply did this to find out once and for all if Google really can detect and more importantly weed out scrapers from the index. The fact is that they can’t. When they encounter duplicate content they simply resort to who has the greater authority and the most keyword targeted backlinks. The only time they seem to get it right is when the scraper leaves in links that point back to the original source.

So what recourse do you have if a scraper is stealing your content and outranks you? Technically Google allows you to report these sites in webmaster tools. Go ahead but don’t expect much. I have reported several sites that regularly steal my MMO content. Has Google de-listed any of them? Nope. The good news is that none of these scrapers outrank me but they are still listed in the serp’s.

Note: RT over at Untwisted Vortex has a good article discussing some of the things you can do with scrapers. See… Defeating Bad Scrapers the Free and Easy Way

The end result is that Google has been putting on a front with regards to duplicate content and the fact is that they do not have a means to weed it out with an automated system. They can only do it manually and they simply don’t have the manpower to do so. An automated system would not be feasible as they would lose far too many top earners like the news organizations who scrape content as a rule. Google doesn’t have an answer aside from maintaining an exaggerated account of what they are capable of. Make people think they will be penalized and hopefully this will stop them from scraping content. Have you noticed that scrapers are becoming ever more prevalent? Seems more and more people are calling Google’s bluff.

Make Money Online

Posted by Grizzly on Jul 5th, 2008 | 179 comments

Welcome to “Make Money Online with Griz”.

Some of you may be familiar with my work online but for those who aren’t let me fill you in on what I do and humbly suggest that you heed my advice before wasting a lot of time and energy trying to earn money online. All because you followed the advice of people who make money off of you but don’t tell you how to do it yourself.

Regardless of what niche you pick your success always comes down to one single and simple barrier – traffic. If you can solve the traffic problem or lack of it that is, then you can make money online. It really does all boil down to that. Get traffic – make money. Get more traffic and make more money.

Simple.

Except…

Getting traffic is the hardest thing to do online. There are millions and millions of websites and blogs dotting the Internet landscape and getting people to come to your site, out of all the possibilities, is the hardest task to achieve.

Lucky for you I just happen to be pretty good at getting traffic. I also like to discuss how I do it. Moreover I give the info away for free. Right now you just said to yourself… “Oh great – free! It must be crappy advice if he isn’t charging for it”.

I’m the first to admit that nobody knows everything and I’m not an expert but I have developed some techniques that work well for ranking high in the search engines for every keyword I target. I will show you some examples below.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to publicizing a website or blog. The popular model is such that you set up a site and then join every social network you can and get yourself seen. Build up friends, who become readers and work at getting your RSS Feed subscriber total into the thousands. This will attract advertisers trying to sell something to your large readership. On paper this sounds good (and yes it works) but it is a lot of work, you don’t make any money for a long time and your readership won’t buy product. They are bloggers just like you and they come for information. They know what an affiliate link is and they sure as hell aren’t going to use your link to buy something – most will use their own. Yes, you can make a decent living following this model but the odds are against it. Only the very top bloggers make good money doing this and they number a few dozen out of millions. The chance of rising above the crowd and becoming one of the few is quite unrealistic for most.

The other school of thought for getting traffic is ranking high in the search engines – specifically Google.

If your website ranks number 1 on Google’s search engine result page (SERP’s) for the word (know as a “KEYWORD”) “Shoes” then you can expect hundreds of thousands of visitors. If you can’t find a way to make money from a site with that many visitors then you shouldn’t be online. Needless to say the site that does rank #1 sells shoes. I bet they sell a lot of them…

This model simply targets highly searched “keywords” and sets about building a website or blog that is relevant to the keyword. This is called search engine optimization (SEO) and it’s what I do. The idea is to rank on top of the search engines for keywords that get searched for by lots of people. Do this and you gain steady traffic that doesn’t change much from day to day and it’s the kind of traffic that is looking for something specific. They buy stuff. They aren’t other marketers and bloggers – just ordinary people looking for something online. Get a lot of this kind of traffic and you can make money with Adsense, Affiliate Products or Lead Generation to name just a few. You can also make a decent buck from advertisers who are after your traffic.

One of the most competitive terms online is “Make Money Online“. It is the holy grail of keywords – not the toughest but one of the most coveted keywords. Ranking number 1 for this term says one thing – your SEO is better than everyone else.

I have another blog that has been around for a year and a half. It is called “How to Make Money Online for Beginners“. If the title isn’t bad enough you’ll love this – it’s built on Blogger’s free platform. It’s a plain ugly free blogspot blog. Cost me nothing.

As of today’s post this is how my other blog ranks in Google for several of the main “Make Money Online” Keywords. I said I could prove I know a bit about SEO and I present the evidence below. These rankings change regularly and may not be accurate at the time you read this.

I rank 5th for the top prize – “Make Money Online” – only 42 million competing pages…

and number 1 for several related terms.

“How to Earn Money Online”

“How To Make Money”

“How to Make Money Online”

“Make Money for Beginners”

“Making Money Online”

“Make Money Online Right Now”

“How Can I Make Money Online”

SEO is what I do.

If you want to learn – for free – start by reading my “How to Make Money Online for Beginners” blog and then come back here and learn the rest of what I do.

ps. That free ugly blog makes several thousand dollars a month.

Cheers

Griz

Monday July 7 – Update.

Rhys asked the following question in the comments below…

“Can we infer from your Domain name that G can separate out(and use) the keywords in the name, without hyphens? Humans often can’t, and I feel not using hyphens leads to confusion.”

Rhys, as you can see G can decipher the words used in a long url. While this may confuse humans I am only interested in how the search engines see my url. Humans are given plenty of visible text in the Blog Title, Page Titles and Post Titles. Url’s are for the search engines. I have said this often – if you want top spot in the serp’s you really do need your main keyword in your URL or else you will need thousands and thousands of links to make up for this deficiency.