Thread: Negative Effect on SEO From Duplicate Content

Originally Posted by bogart

PR isn't so much an indicator of quality as a 'lack of PR' or grayed-out indicates some issues i.e. duplicate content. But PR is updated so infrequently that it becomes useless. When was the last Google PR update in 2011?

Honestly I don't really care for PR, and I guess Google skipped to update the toolbar PR for more than a year now.

I think that the MAYDAY/FARMER/PANDA Google algorithm updates are attacking the same problem. Publishers/the IM industry has sucessfully dominated long tail search and brand keywords to the point that big adwords clients are complaining. Something like you said, "more visitors and less customers".

Well, I don't see how Google can attack the publishers without wipping out massive legitimate businesses that write unique high quality articles on their sites using white hat SEO.

Now I see coupon spamming sites scrapping contents like our meta description or displaying no contents with our company name or domain name.

Did the Panda update did the job against these kind of spammers? Absolutely not.
Did the Panda update dis the job against the spammers stealing the brand name and use it on their page titles for their own gains? Asolutely not.

These are just a few examples.

If the big adwords clients are complaining, Google shouldn't change anything because they said that their goal is good user experience.

The trend is an Adwords overlap on the organic search when the ads are above the organic column which really take the wind when we all know that the first position is about 70% of traffic.

Something to read: 2009: The Year AdWords Attacked Organic Search | The ClickEquations Blog

I think the author should update this article because it is very actual in 2011

The article is a good one, if had explained with examples then it would have been more interesting.

Originally Posted by Natural Elements

Well, I don't see how Google can attack the publishers without wipping out massive legitimate businesses that write unique high quality articles on their sites using white hat SEO.

You know, that might be another great point against blackhat in general. Not only do you risk your site getting penalized and losing business, but you contribute to a trend that may make it hard to succeed even if you finally resort to whitehat. All small businesses suffer in the end. Alas, this already seems to have happened, and we're reaping the consequences. But hey blackhatters, you just keep spamming, doing a great job at killing the very industry that feeds you (or rather shoving the industry to the hands of a few big players you can't compete with)!

Duplicate content can be fixed. It happens everywhere. It results in spamming. Google webmaster is a great tool to identify duplicate content issue.

This makes no sense to me. Why not copy some articles and link back to them if they are good? Why would a copied article get ranked high and then some sites have their original articles penalized if they are penalized for copying others?

If your site is penalized and you write unique articles and suddenly see someone who copied you outrank you (yes, they do link back), then this is not really working as intended.