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.

What is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword Stuffing used to be an activity that web designers indulged in to make sure that their web pages ranked well for a variety of search terms.  So, if you searched for “digital camera” you would encounter a page of text such as:

“My best digital camera was the digital camera I bought on holiday at a digital camera store in a large digital camera market…” etc. etc. ad nauseum.

Clearly this kind of document reads badly to a human, but old style search engines loved it.

You see, until fairly recently the internet was indexed like an academic document.  If you said (in the html page title) that the topic of a web page was “free health care” and stuffed the page with keywords  about “free health care” then the search engine would accept that “free health care” was indeed what the page was about, despite the fact that the page had endless pornographic images and links.

The Google Effect

Google is currently the world’s largest search engine by traffic volume.  The guy’s at Google became increasingly fed up with this kind of web page ranking highly (along with the rest of us) and so they started to change the methods used to index a page in the Google directory.

The exact method’s used are by Google are a hotly debated subject and employee’s have none disclosure agreements and so we will probably never know exactly how Google indexes its pages, but we can say with certainty that a simple tactic such as I just described no longer works.

And so keywords died, or did they?

You see Google excels at answering the questions people ask.  When you enter search text in a search engine you are effectively asking “Where can I find this resource?”  If Google’s reply is relevant then you are happy and will return.  If the page is full of useless spam links then of course next time you search you might just try another search engine.  So, if you ask Google about “BMW cars” then this is what is needed as a reply, there is no way around it.  This is what the industry calls a keyword phrase and is a valid means of looking for information.

Well, these day’s keywords appear to work a little differently than in the past.  Keywords in an article can be measured by how many times they appear e.g. 4 appearances in a 100 word article is a keyword density of 4% and so on.   It seems that modern indexing methods penalise a keyword density over about 2-3% (opinions vary).

The search engine algorithm also appears to alter this penalty based upon content type.  If you are talking about “Tiger Woods” then Google will expect to see a few repetitions of “golf” and maybe a few other topical keywords besides!

The point is that it appears that the algorithm is adaptive to content and context.

Interesting.

While this isn’t science fiction standard artificial intelligence, it is certainly heading down that road.  When a sci-fi hero speaks to his voice activated computer and asks for information the results are generally exactly what he wants, even if the context in which the question was asked is ambiguous.

Perhaps the first artificial intelligence really will be a search engine and not an insurance actuarial computer or something similar. If it is a search engine I just hope it doesn’t get caught watching porn or downloading warez while it should be working!

Anyway, I said that keywords are dead.  What brought them back to life?

Well again it seems that topicality of a search is determined by: Uri, directory (if used) and then html page title.  So www.spamsite.com (hopefully not a real website) will always have topicality if someone is searches for “spam site” with big G.  So now we see a rash of “niche” sites abusing trademarks of well known companies in order to gain traffic.

Optimising a Webpage for Relevance (Long Live Keywords!)

The best option for ranking purposes seems to be to include your keyword in the url of the site, in a local directory if necessary and then in the html page title.  Additionally this keyword should be in the H1 heading and possibly also used in h2 and h3’s if they exist also.

For example:  http://spamsite.com/spamsite/spamsite.html

The “spamsite.html” document would be of the form

<h1>spamsite main title</h1>

<h2>spamsite secondary title 1</h2>

<h3>Spamsite additional information 1.1</h3>

<h3>Spamsite additional information 1.2</h3>

<h3>Spamsite additional information 1.3</h3>

<h2>spamsite secondary title 2</h2>

<h3>Spamsite additional information 2.1</h3>

What amuses me about learning all this over recent weeks is that this “technique” for SEO, so successfully employed by websites with nothing useful to say, is that it is also the defacto standard for referencing academic documents via html and I am pretty sure it was part of a web standards document released by http://w3.org some time ago.

Of course there are other factors involved in determining where a particular page comes in the results of a search such as authority, age of the site, age of links and so on.  I don’t pretend to know it all about these subjects, but the sheer irony of guys with almost nothing to say earning a living by bucking the system and mimicking academic style was just too good to pass over.

If we do eventually develop a science fiction style super-intelligence; when we ask it a question will it just repeat keywords to us in answer?

Dave Felton

This week has been so busy.  To be honest about it, I was unprepared for the amount of work this new direction would entail.

Internet marketing has a bad reputation because so many people running the courses are scam artists teaching bad information or maybe nothing at all.  I have been lucky in that the people I am involved with seem genuine and the information supplied checks out, at least so far.  It has been refreshing to have it explained why it takes so much work to be successful.

So, as I am so happy with my new associates am I going to name them?  The short answer is “No”.  The reason why is that until a cheque is cashed and in my bank account it could well all be wrong and it would be incorrect of me to promote an unproven idea.  I hope you understand.

Developing the New Websites

My last post mentioned that I am now the proud owner of six new websites.  This actually isn’t quite factual.  What I should have said is “I now own six new domains”.  This difference doesn’t sound like much does it?  So what is the difference?

The difference is about 60,000 words!  Yes, you read that correctly.

What is more remarkable is that the majority of those words are used in marketing the sites, not in content on the actual pages.  Content on the six sites will be maybe 25-30% of that total.  Or at least this percentage will remain true during the time it takes for the sites to establish themselves.  While I am grateful for the new knowledge that I have gained about making money on the internet, I do wonder if just writing that novel would have been easier!

To put things in perspective, minimum manuscript length for science fiction novels tends to be about 85,000 words.  A short story, suitable for submission to a professional magazine like Fantasy and Science Fiction starts at around 5,000 words.  Writing articles of this length is starting to look very reasonable recently!

This last week has seen two of the sites come into existence.  It is far too early to say if they will bring any real income but they are at least up on the web and the initial phase is finished.

The Search for Financial Security

So why do all this work?  Well, two reasons.  Firstly, I hope that in the long term I can make a small residual income from the advertising on these websites.  Second, if this happens, then it will take the pressure off my personal financial situation following my hospitalisation and all that goes with it.

Financial security will enable me to write that darned elusive novel with a clean conscience.

That is the plan anyway…

Dave

Unfortunately, most of my previous writing has not been produced with an eye to making money.  In short, my writing was a hobby.  While there is nothing wrong with writing for pleasure, surely you can write mostly the same things and write for profit?

Well, I have now started out on the road to see if I can make money from writing articles for the web and still enjoy it.  It is early days but it has been fun so far.  I am once again the proud owner of an Adsense account and have also signed up for Kontera inline ads and a few other services that should help me “monetise” my writing.  And yes, “monetise” was in quotes as I view it as a contemptible phrase used by internet marketers, such as myself!

If you are feeling brave then my first attempt at a hubpage is now in existence at http://hubpages.com/hub/What-is-Chess and you might want to take a look at my personal profile in my Conflagrant persona also.  The plan is to take part in the 30 pages in 30 days challenge on hubpages.com and see if I can make a small amount of regular income as well.

Why am I writing in a persona?  Well, originally I opened the account under this name as I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to be publically associated with writing hubpages primarily for cash.  Then I got real, realised that I am not Stephen King and just got on with it.  At some point I will open another hubpage.com account and write under my real name, but for now Conflagrant can have his fun.

Dave Felton

“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” – attributed to Robert Heinlein in his 1966 book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  It is a great book.  Buy it and read it if you haven’t already.

When I set out writing this blog one of the things that I fully intended to avoid was giving bad or unsound advice.  Therefore as a beginning writer I feel that I have no business writing “How to” articles for example.  Unfortunately I nearly broke my own code recently in a fit of enthusiasm.

Every day I trawl the internet for ideas for this blog; creative writing, science fiction, general education and such like.  As is typical for the internet some of what I come across is rubbish and occasionally some of it is gold.

Well, I recently came across what I thought was gold and was tempted to blog about it here.  Of course the idea seems like a good one and there is a huge urge to share, but I have absolutely zero idea if it actually works!

While I was writing a long and enthusiastic post Heinlein’s words were ringing in my ears along with other wisdom such as “If it looks too good to be true, then it probably IS too good to be true”.  Maybe the cynical old goat in me won in the end.  Accordingly, I will explore the truth or otherwise of the situation and only post when I have some facts.

So what was my great idea?  It is hardly a new one, but it is something that I hadn’t actually seriously considered before.  It relates to writing articles online for cash, for sites like:

http://hubpages.com/

At the moment I am writing maybe one blog post a day, one short story a month and a novel maybe later this year.  The blog is mostly a labour of love, although I might kid myself it will help me become better known.  The short stories, even if all were published they will net me maybe £2-300 each.  The novel and its mythical advance payment is a totally unknown item.  None of these things are going to reliably feed me.

The sensible side of me knows that if I am to earn a living as a writer (one of my long term goals) then it will likely be damn hard work, so when a website offers me hard work and a little cash I jumped at the idea – only later considering if it was a real offer and not just hype and a con job.  Even writing this now I am no wiser.  The only solution is to try it and see.  Maybe I can make some lunch money?