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Google Demystifies Duplicate Content – Kind a Sort a

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:39:23 +0000

This is going to be one short post but with the amount of times this topic seems to resurface I thought I would do my due diligence and share it with you. The gist of it all is that they are indicating that there is no real penalty BUT (and a big one) there can be problems.

Check out the post at…

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:49:23 +0000

This guest post is written by Will Paoletto. Will is an SEO Strategist at Big Oak Inc., the SEO agency, responsible for the comic gem Ranked Hard

How to Deal with People who are Stealing your Content

Have you ever been the victim of stolen or scraped content? Sometimes sites that steal your content end up ranking above you for various keywords, and in the worst case scenario, the stolen content actually confuses Google and causes it to penalize your site. First, let’s cover one of the common tactics that people use to sabotage other sites by stealing their content, and then let’s go over how to hunt down and deal with the people who do this.

One of the relatively simple tactics that people use to sabotage other sites is to scrape their content and then turn the content into articles for submission to article directories. They submit the articles to hundreds of article directories, make the byline of the article their name (or presumably a pseudonym), and link off to their website in the author’s box. When websites come along and syndicate these articles, they are all attributed to the thief’s website. As a result, Google may look at the original content owner’s site and now assume that it is nothing but a collection of stolen articles from around the net. You would think Google would be wise enough to identify the person who had the pages cached first as the original owner, but there are documented cases of Google filters being tripped as result of this tactic. As is always the case, established websites are much less likely to fall prey to this banning technique, and sites with high trust rank would likely be invincible to it.

Of course this is just one of the many ways that stolen content can be hazardous to the health of your site. So how do you deal with the people who do this? Well, in the example above, the thief is attempting to increase his Google ranking and simultaneously sabotage the competition, so he is giving away his URL. You can deal with this person by taking the following steps:

1. If the webmaster has no contact information on his site, then skip to step 4. If he/she actually has contact information or a contact form, then be cordial in your initial email to the site owner. Do not be rude. Being unprofessional or nasty will only make the person less likely to cooperate. After sending an email to the owner, wait about 24 hours. If you do not receive a response, then email the owner again, and this time be a bit more forward. In the best case scenario, the thief will bow to your wishes and remove your content.

2. If 48 hours go by and you still haven’t received a response from the person, go to a public forum (preferably one in your niche) and announce that they are stealing your content. Say that you have emailed them twice and have yet to receive a reply. Ask the forum if anyone has a way to get in touch with them. Do not attempt to publicly defame this person because doing so will only sacrifice your professionalism. Other members of the forum will likely do your bidding for you anyway.

3. If more than 48 hours pass without a response from the person, then send a third email detailing the steps you will take if they do not remove your content. Say that you will contact their sponsors, their web host, and any party helping them. If the individual has stolen images from you and is hosting them on a photo sharing website, say that you will file a DMCA request with the image host.

4. If they have no contact information on their site and their domain registration info is private, then you’ll want to contact their web host. You can find out who their web host is by looking up their site’s IP address and then doing a reverse DNS lookup. You can accomplish both of these tasks by using a site like dnstools.com. Tell the web host what this person is doing, and the host should cooperate with you. They have to look into the matter by law, but as we know, not all web hosts are created equal, so you may have to send dozens of support tickets. You can also file a DMCA request with Google and other search engines. Reporting the site through Google webmaster tools is an additional option as well.

The key to success is remaining civil with the person stealing your content. They’ll be much more likely to comply with your demands if you never break away from a friendly, professional tone. Smile through the screen as you file DMCA requests and report them though webmaster tools. By the way, if you don’t have a clear copyright notice on your website, you should add one, otherwise your stance will be severely weakened if you ever find yourself embroiled in a controversy over content.

So did this post help and what are your comments about it?

Duplicate Content Duplicate Content – Is There An Echo in Here?

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:47:04 +0000

Yesterday we posted about content with purpose and it brought up a question about “Duplicate Content” and we figured that we better address this before we get into talking about actually posting content on different social media sites. A word of warning however, the following is 100% our opinion only and is based on what we have seen from our result.

1. Duplicate Content is More then Just the Body of the Content

Duplicate content is not just focused on the content body itself but it can be due to other page factors such as the page title and meta description. Basically Google has a goal and that is to offer the best search results they possible can and to achieve that they want to ensure that the results are not simply multiple copies of the same content. This is especially important for on your own blog when you have two articles that are on the same topic but are completely different.

If you put the same title and or description on both pages there is a huge chance that Google will actually consider one a duplication of the other. They figure that if the two pages are talking about the same thing then why should they display both pages.

So the first thing is always ensure your blog has a unique title and description for every page.

2. Do Not Post Content on Another Site and Then Link to the Same Content on Your Site

This may sound obvious but we see it often and what happens is people will create an article, then submit it to an article directory or even another blog and then link to the exact same article on their own blog.

This is pretty much a waste of time since Google is going to only use one version of the content. Instead make sure to always modify your content as much as possible before you link it back to the original content. Remember, you want to own multiple spots in the top 10 for your keyword and by modifying the content you can do that.

3. Using a Snippet of the Content and Linking to the Source Content?

In yesterday’s post i mentioned having content with purpose and part of that was to…

Give part of the answer but leave them wanting more
Give them the exact steps to get the rest of the story

What we meant by this was not just giving them part of the article (such as the first paragraph) and then telling them to read the rest of the article by clicking here. Yes you can use this strategy but what we actually mean by this is that you give them some of the answers to their problem but do not give them everything.

You want them to feel like they got value and learned something but if you tell them everything then they have no need to visit your site. On the other hand if you only give them a tiny little taste (like the first paragraph) then you more then likely have not been able to tell them enough to get them interested.

Give them enough to show you know what you are talking about, that you can relate to their situation and that you can help them with their problem… then give them a link to follow.

OK, we know this is not exactly a duplicate content issue but we felt it was something to address none the less

4. Duplicate Content will NOT banish your site:

We blame Internet marketers for this rumor and the reason is they are putting the fear of God into people about duplicate content in order to sell what ever it is they have.

Duplicate content is not a great thing but it is not the evil enemy of Google either. You kind of got to use a little common sense here (yes we know it is not so common).

Think about news sites and popular blogs… they post other peoples content all the time and the reason is the content is worth while and something worth sharing. The issue is when 100% of your content is duplicate content and you are offering nothing new to your readers, then it can cause issues.

If you do post other peoples content on your blog then we recommend you make sure you have one unique post for every duplicate post. It is also wise to make sure your page title and description are different then what others have published.

Also, if you submit an article with an article distribution service, you are NOT in danger of punishing your site. What these services do is blast the same article out to 1000′s of article directories and the idea is to get loads of back links. The issue is this content is all duplicate content and Google pretty much has lost all respect for article directory links from 95% of the directories. Now that does not mean the links are worthless… but they just are not all that fantastic. Also since the content is duplicate, they will only show one or maybe two at the most of your articles in their results… which means very limited traffic.

What will not happen is Google will NOT punish your site or blog for this. If this was the case then all you would have to do is submit the same article to loads of sites and link to your competitors and you could eliminate them all.

5. How Unique Does the Content Need to Be?

This question always seems to come up and the simple answer is as much as possible. The bare minimum however, in our opinion, is to ensure that the title and description are 100% unique and then make sure the body of the content is at least 30% unique.

We have done tests and have seen that making the title and description unique has made the biggest impact. So if your really lazy then at least make your titles and descriptions unique.

Summary:

It basically comes down to the question of are you focused on just getting back links or are you focused on getting traffic!

When you are using article directories or social media sites like Squidoo and Hubpages, you want to ensure that all your submitted content ranks well in the search engines. By putting the same content on all the sites, sure you get back links but only one of the sites will appear in the rankings for that focused term. If you make sure there is unique content on each of those sites then you can potentially rank in the top 10 with each one!

So which one would you rather have… one search result and multiple back links or multiple search results and multiple rankings?

Any comments or questions?