Duplicate Content Penalties: Problems with Google’s Filter - More New Spam
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Recently, this has happened to one of even Google’s own: Matt Cutts. Matt is known as the “GoogleGuy”. While what's happened to Matt’s blog is not really "hijacking", it does bear similarities. The source of a story, in this case, Matt's blog, has been “washed” out of the results pages by duplicates on other sites; part of a noticeable problem in the way that search engines handle duplicate content, and the trouble they have determining the original. In particular, Google seem very prone to this - and as I have pointed out, no one is exempt...
“What you are seeing…is stealing contents in day light and Google isn’t able, as usual, to differentiate between the original contents and the duplicates. And as many fellow members, which sites either dropped totally from the index or just lost much of their rankings because of the same problem, have reported on this thread. It is a real disaster that both Google and the webmasters community are [phrasing].”
So where do I direct my criticism? Will it be enough for me to know that people are getting fed up with the more and more irrelevant results in the SERPs from the likes of Google, and hope they just use Yahoo or MSN instead?
How do I ensure that my original content is what is going to be listed in the SERPs after six weeks? That is a good question, and one that I probably can’t answer at this time. The only advice I have at this point is just keep submitting the content, and hope that Google catches on. That advice feels lame, however. After all, what comfort or solace does the words “Better luck next time” actually bring, especially when you know the competition has cheated?
Great, original content is always one of the key things you are encouraged to have in your website. But we have seen a huge shift in content importance, especially where Google is concerned, in favor of link popularity. This really has not been a big secret since Google showed up on the search engine scene in 1995 (at that time called “BackRub”). But some of us feel it has now gotten out of hand. Those sites that have far more link superiority get credit for content that may or may not even be their own, while those sites that choose to opt for content over link popularity get punished for duplicate content. MSN seems to be the first search engine to effectively handle the duplicate content accurately, with Yahoo coming in close behind them. Google is still clear out in left field.
So how do we keep all three search engines happy, while getting your original content ranked high in the SERPs? In summary, concentrate on your link popularity, and keep that content coming. You could write Google letters, asking them to remedy the situation, but who knows whether it’ll help. With the way that search engines change, I’d imagine that enough uproar from the community will get Google’s attention.
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