First of all, was my last post really in March?  Whoops! I have been kind of busy.  I now have 17 websites on the go and I admit to losing track a little.  Overall everything is going well and I am making a small amount of regular cash.  The amount coming in is doubling slowly and so I am hopeful about seeing some genuine residual income in the future.

However this post is about the Google duplicate content penalty and my real life experiences of it rather that what SEO ”experts” will tell you.

Some Real World Experiences of the Duplicate Content Penalty

Regular readers will know that I joined an online group back at the start of March in an effort to make a regular income from writing.  This experiment has not really run its course yet and so I have not commented very much on it.  What has happened is that I now know an awful lot more about SEO and making sure that people actually see what you write, instead of blogging to an audience that basically consists of friends and the neighbour’s cat. Admittedly much of what I have learned I still haven’t applied to this site (more is the pity) but will do so in time.

The Importance of Google

Like it or not Google is extremely important to webmasters.  The majority of search traffic goes through big G.  If you rank badly in Google then a significant number of potential visitors will most likely never even see your site.  SEO “experts” say content is king, but great content with no traffic is pointless.  If you don’t care about traffic then you should write a diary and keep it under the bed, rather than writing web pages.

What I want to talk about today is events surrounding two of the sites I have set up.

The first is a product review type site, monetised by Amazon Affiliates and the second is an online gaming site that employs auto-feeds to load flash games.

Despite a recent Page Rank review by Google both of these sites are currently PR0 – which effectively means they are at the bottom of the pile.  They are hidden from search engine traffic like a naughty stepchild, locked in the basement.  As I have placed links to these sites, I know from the results on my other websites that these pages should have seen Page Rank improvements and SERP’s increases.

Google maintains that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.  They say that all that happens when two pages show the same content is that they will decide which one is authoritative and show results for that one only.  Webmasters are told that, for a product review site, there is no point in listing the same information as Amazon, unless you add significant original content and reader value alongside the content from Amazon’s page.  This is exactly what I have done, but it appears that this information is wrong.

On my product review site I show an affiliate link to the product on sale along with a review that varies from 350 to 550 words in length.  The Amazon text is marked as blockquote as I believed that a search engine would recognise it for what it is – additional information from a reliable source.  This process of quoting from an authoritative source is standard academic practice and is a principle on which the internet is founded – always quote your source.

But I was wrong.

The whole site remains at PR0 despite having nine incoming PR6 links along with a variety of others.  The site does not rank in the top 150 in Google even for its own domain name!  This final point is what nails it.

The site you are reading this article on is currently PR2, with only 3 PR6 links and a lot of nofollow PR0 blog links from places where I have left comments.  My other sites have ranked with minimal linking, but all my other sites have 100% original content, bar one.

And guess what?  The other site is also PR0 and doesn’t rank even for its own domain name despite being over 600 pages in size.  So what is the problem?  I suspect that again it is duplicate content.  The second site imports a game, along with a description of what the game is about, how to play etc.  This description comes from the game publisher and is definitely duplicated content as it is widely syndicated.  I did not alter this text as I thought it was wrong to alter the original authors work.  To me, the service I am offering to users is the ability to play games online, not words on a screen.  Again, at least so far as Google is concerned, I was wrong.

To be clear on this, I have no problem with Google penalising duplicate content.  A few years ago the top ten or twenty web pages for a given search would be pr0n or the same content duplicated by a number of webmasters.  This was frustrating and had to stop.

Is Googles Duplicate Content Advice Wrong?

What annoys me in this instance is that Google advises two things:

Duplicate content penalties are only relevant to the page the content is on – this doesn’t appear to be true as on the product review site about half of the pages have no Amazon content on them at all and yet none of the pages have a page rank higher than zero and none of the pages rank appropriately in Googles SERPs.  The same pages rank well in Bing and Yahoo incidentally, so it is definitely a Google issue.

The other thing Google implies is that partially duplicated content is ok, so long as the page adds significant value apart from that content.  My product review site carries about 100 words from Amazon and on average maybe 450 words of the review itself, yet the page gets spanked by Google.  In fact not only does the page get spanked, but the whole site does, despite the fact that half of the pages have 100% original content.

Google maintains that there is no such thing as a site wide duplicate content penalty.  Forgive me, but this looks like a site wide penalty to me.

What annoys me further is that I regularly see sites with reasonable page rank and SERPs, that are only providing duplicate content.  How are they getting away with it?  Something is clearly wrong here and as yet I do not understand why this should be the case.  No doubt time and experience will reveal all.

Avoiding the Google Duplicate Content Penalty

Looking to the future, what can be done?  Well, I have signed up for copyscape.com’s services.  I now know exactly which pages are being flagged for duplicate content and have started the long process of re-writing them.

Once each page is re-written I will throw a few new links at the sites and affected articles and hope that Googles spider will notice that the content has changed.  If this does not work then I guess I will have to look at other options.

One thing is certain, I will be a lot more careful about employing affiliate links and product information in future.

The problem was, that as I still don’t have a published novel, I don’t see myself as a writer, at least not as a professional writer, not yet anyway.  I thought, “Why is he asking me, of all people?”  Then I realised, you are what you do and I do write a lot.

I write maybe three thousand words a day at the moment.  Some of this writing is blog posts like this one, some of it is articles for sale, some is science fiction of varying length and some of it is for Google Adsense or similar “monetised” content.  If a writer is someone who writes, then I guess I qualify, despite my protestations of being a “wannabe”.

So how could I help the guy become a writer?  What *cough* sage advice could I offer?

Well, the single best piece of advice I could offer to become a writer was write often.

Write something every day, even if your head hurts, even if you don’t want to and think your writing sucks.  Of course if it does suck then don’t submit it for publication, but at least you can delete/burn/sacrifice it to a dark God or something.

(No manuscripts were hurt in the publication of this post – Science Fiction Manuscripts Protection League)

Writing is sort of like a muscle.  If you exercise often you become fitter and if you write often you become a writer.  The exercise stops being a chore and becomes automatic.  The fact that your subconscious brain takes up the job makes the writing process a lot easier.

Dare I say it, that if you write every day, writing becomes fun?

Becoming a writer just creeps up on you, sort of like it did for me.

I honestly believe this to be true and I can see no reason why it wouldn’t apply to any area of writing whether you are writing poetry, creative writing, or advanced technical writing for a non-fiction manual.  Write and you will improve.

There are, of course, books and writing courses that will help you improve your writing, such as Strunk and White’s excellent guide which has been an industry standard reference for decades.  Over time I will review some of the many writing instruction books on this site.

As this area is such a big one I suspect that to answer it properly will require a static page.  No doubt this won’t be the last time someone asks how to become a writer and it would be nice to say “Have a look at my website.”

While I was happy to help this guy I can only be relieved that he didn’t ask me how to be a published novelist!

Best wishes.

Dave Felton

Of course since I wrote that promise I have had a P.E., a lengthy hospital stay and a large dose of pneumonia.  These events kind of disrupted my plans…but no more!

In starting this review process I looked for a good candidate that offered the best starting point and I really think I found it.

Becoming a Writer

I think it is true to say this is the single best book on writing I own and has definitely been the most practical use as a beginning writer.

This book was written before all the current trends for political correctness (1934) and offers helpful, pithy advice to a writer that is starting out.  It is because of the books succinct, direct style that I recommend it without reservation.

The printing I received is a small book of a mere 192 pages, yet it is packed with useful information.  Ms Brande shows a great understanding of the psychology of writers and puts that knowledge to use in a friendly, but strict manner.  I truly regret that I will never get to meet her, or attend a writing class of hers.

Amongst the good news the book offers is the fact that anyone can become a writer, it is just that we have varying degrees of ability.  This fact must surely come as a delight to anyone that has been told that being a writer is somehow an innate ability and make the book worthy of purchase on its own.

It needs to be realised that the book is not about the mechanics of writing.  There are a great many books that are about plot, character, English usage etc. and I will be reviewing some of them over later weeks.  This is book is, as the title states, the process of becoming a writer.

I won’t spoil the book by commenting further on Ms Brande’s advice, except to say that it is most worthwhile following the advice she gives and performing the exercises.  Don’t buy this book if you tend to read a self help book and then leave it on the shelf.  Ms Brande would not approve!

If you are a writer wannabe, like me, buy this book!

Becoming a Writer