No Country for Duplicate Content
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A word to the wise - always take free content from your affiliate merchant networks, especially articles with a grain of salt or risk getting penalized by Google for duplicate content.
Love it or hate it, Google has the lion’s share of traffic on the internet. A duplicate content penalty means you could end up in the sandbox, and this will impact your site negatively in two major ways:
- You will see a huuuge decrease in your Pagerank, e.g. pr 6 to a pr 3 or even a pr 4 drop to pr 0!
- You won’t get anymore organic search engine traffic from Google
That last part is the most problematic, because as an affiliate that’s going to hit you in the wallet - the only way you can drive traffic to your sites now are with paid campaigns.Free resources are great, the problem is hundreds or thousands of other affiliates promoting the same product also have access. However, if you’re not the original source of the content, you have a duplicate content problem. When googlebot indexes the web, who gets credit for the original content if more than 1 copy is found?
Duplicate content is a very touchy subject - what’s a webmaster to do if a hot original post gets picked up by a higher ranking SERP site such as Digg or Reddit? Some say the first site to get indexed gets the credit, others say the site with the most relevant links does - because google equates relevant links with authority.
It’s hard to say exactly how Google checks for duplicate content because Google is very secretive about their methods, but Google is very good at catching it. I like to use free content as a springboard to writing my own original content. I try to retain roughly 30% of the free resource (in order to maintain keyword relevancy) and rewrite the other 70%. A big advantage I get from re-writing the free content myself (as opposed to paying someone to do it for me) is that it helps me think of keywords and search phrases for the related ppc campaign.
Either way, the ORACLE has spoken …. How do you deal with duplicate content?
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Comments
Just to add a word about Digg. While back when my blog posts would get on digg, it would initially rank well there, but eventually Google would figure out where did the article come from. I never had any of my articles hit the front page either…
Vlad’s last blog post..Shoud You Consider Your Own Name For Your Webite’s URL?
In my opinion (& experience) the issue of “Duplicate Content” is way overblown!
Google (and the other search engines) understand that much of the web’s content can be syndicated. Because of this, there will always be duplicate content in the form of articles, press releases, news etc.
Google is not seeking to “penalize” anyone who’s writing and submitting content to be syndicated but is trying to index unique content for a particular term.
To say that Article Marketing (or online PR’s) no longer work is just not true. You may find that your articles don’t get indexed as often but they can still bring you traffic from any of the websites/blogs that choose to syndicate your content.
I wrote an article on “Affiliate Marketing” a while back and found that there are still 46 different pages indexed in Google with that article.
So much for those who say Google won’t index more than one… it’s just not true.
Want to check for yourself? Put the following article title in Google and see how many results you get…
“Affiliate Marketing Tips - Creative Strategies For Affiliate Marketing Success”
Of course, it will likely diminish over time but this is why article writer’s must continue to publish articles and not give up on their Article Marketing activities.
I am not sure to have severe Google’s penalty of duplicate content is. But I can attest that article marketing is the thing of the past because of duplicate content.
I think the date when an article is published (or discovered by Google) is extremely important. I am sure this is not the only factor it uses to differentiate an original from the duplicate.
Vlad’s last blog post..Shoud You Consider Your Own Name For Your Webite’s URL?