Duplicate Content Penalties: Problems with Google’s Filter - The New Spam (Page 4 of 5 )
The New Spam
Google is still extremely vulnerable, whether they like to admit it or not, to arbitrary influence from spam. It’s these spamming techniques that prompt the creation of these filters in the first place. But has there been a line crossed? Most certainly. It is a huge problem when advocates of white-hat techniques follow the rules, and the ruthless spammers don’t follow any rules, but when those spammers still end up winning, it’s frustrating. In this case, however, it isn’t even about spammers and their intentions. If you have a better PageRank than John Doe, then John Doe’s content will look better for your site than it will for his. Is Google’s criterion for relevancy so hampered by its link relevancy that they can simply fail to determine what original content is and what is duplicate? This seems fairly simple to me.
Terms like 302 Hijacks, Google-bombing, and Google-Washing are new terms; some of which you’ve never heard of, but the concepts are fairly similar. They are basically techniques that black hats, whether they are scrapers or old-fashioned spammers, use to influence a search engines results by attacking the competition, either on purpose or not. I will guarantee you that spammers do it intentionally. Instead of trying to do the right thing to win, they sabotage the results against the competition, even if for only a few weeks. Google denied early on that someone else could hurt your rankings, claiming it was completely impossible. Now, we know this has changed and Google’s Webmaster FAQ pages have been updated to say: “There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”
There have been many new coined terms for this type of behavior that takes advantage of the duplicate content filters, probably many of them popped up because “duplicate content filter penalty” is a mouthful. Google-washing, Google-bombing, dupe-wash, source wash and others, all basically mean the same thing. They mean the original source material is washed out by all the duplicate content from across the web. You post your article, or it gets submitted to article distributors, then millions of blogs or scrapers repost your original content, then the source material gets wiped out in the SERPs.
302 Hijacking, is a completely different animal. This refers to another site getting their URL listed even though clicking takes to your domain. Why would they do this, would you ask? Traffic. They don’t care if it’s qualified or not.
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