How Google`s Quality Raters Treat Web Spam - PPC Pages
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PPC pages are pages camouflaged as search results. Often they are blog posts that have their content surrounded by PPC ads, and do not provide much value to users. Here are the types of "PPC pages" raters identify:
Fake Directories with PPC Ads: refers to PPC listings appearing as search results or directory listings. Here's an example: www.fico.ca
Fake Blogs with PPC Ads: blogs with auto-generated or scraped content surrounded by PPC ads.
Fake Message Boards with PPC Ads: Fake forums with worthless content that rely on content scraped from other forums. Fake forums plug in PPC links within their content or are surrounded by PPC ads.
Scraped or Copied Content with PPC Ads: Google is very good at detecting duplicate content. If algorithms are unsure, the page is flagged for manual review by the human raters. To make sure no one steals your content, use CopyScape. The document mentions that if webmasters give credit to the original source, it is enough to remove the "spam" label from the page.
An entire scraped website will be spotted, but if you copy an article once in a blue moon and give credit to the original source, there's nothing to worry about. Check the search results for "worst SEO mistakes." There are several sites that rank on the first and second pages with duplicate content. I also found this with several other search queries.
In short, copied content is okay if your website is trusted and has plenty of original content. Copied content is not okay if it's your strategy.
To identify duplicate content, Google quality raters must copy a sentence from the page and paste it into search results, something that you can do yourself.
The document also says: " You can look for suspicious "computer-manufactured" grammar," which bring us to the topic of writing your own content.
A while ago a member from Digital Point forums (I couldn't find the thread when I looked) offered some innovative software that took text and made it look unique. It passed CopyScape and delighted many webmasters, who gave it rave reviews. The secret behind it's efficiency was very simple - it took unique pages, translated those pages into a foreign language using Google Translator (or other service) and then translated it back into English. This produced perfectly "different" pages and provided webmasters with "fresh and unique content" to make Google algorithms happy.
As an occasional writer, I couldn't stop laughing. I am not sure if they got caught (because Matt Cutts lurks on those forums), but the lesson is - don't be so cheap. Content production is expensive, but please don't pervert writing like that. It doesn't work long term, and deletion from Google's index is far more expensive than paying for original content.
Google does not consider these items to be duplicate content:
Lyrics
poems
ring tones
quote
proverbs
The document also mentions content positioned below the fold, with nothing but ads on top. Google seems to be okay with this technique as long as content is ORIGINAL.
The important thing to remember is that if the scraped (copied) content on the page is removed and all that remains is ads, it is Spam.
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