I thought I’d add this here instead of the blogging section as it affects all webmasters. But please move if you feel the need to.
I have a few blogs out there, and a few months ago I added a new blog to try to gage the effect of duplicate content. Obviously information on it is hard to find, so I wanted to try to see the effects myself and gain a few hard facts.
I started a blog with 100% duplicate content. The blog began with only sponsor provided text, approximately 100 words for each post.
But as the Panda update hit in the US I wondered what it would be like if a blogger suddenly changed tack and started writing unique content. So I mixed it up a little.
Bearing in mind this was a relatively new blog, so traffic was low, I didn’t mind so much if it was completely destroyed.
So I slightly forgot to check in on it in the past couple of weeks and did so tonight, and you know what I found? Traffic was climbing, right up until April 12th. On the 13th traffic plummeted by 91%.
It has risen again to a modest and stable level, but nothing close to what it was.
So now, I’m going to go back in and rewrite all of the duplicate content, gradually. Hopefully I’ll compile all the numbers and be able to present a clear picture of what the update did to a lot of affiliates out there. Ideally I wanted to establish a threshold of duplicate/original content, perhaps show that having a certain % of duplicate content was okay. But I would suggest perhaps 50% of the blog is original, and Google still sent 91% of my traffic somewhere else.
Did anyone else see anything happen on the 13th?
It would be really interesting to hear if any sponsors saw a traffic slump around this time too. Obviously if your affiliates saw this on their sites due to duplicate content it would be passed on to you too.
I’ve been having some trouble with one of my blogs. Here’s some history.
My blog’s traffic was very good and I held a lot of top 10 rankings for very good keywords. I only use original content written by me. Then on January 29 I installed a new theme. Coincidentally, this was the weekend Google was rolling out a new algo. On January 31 my traffic plummeted.
On Feb 28 I removed a page peel ad that was served from a sponsor’s server, which a buddy told me had a bad reputation.
Mar 12, I turned off All in One SEO and started using this theme’s built-in SEO plugin. This resulted in a site-wide change in the post titles. I did this because it looked like All in One and this built-in were conflicting with one another.
Mar 29, I began to wonder if some sidebar stuff I had put up on the site had something to do with my original drop in Google traffic. This sidebar component was “My Top 10 Fave Guys” type of stuff where I’d include a picture and a few lines of text. When Bjorn and I tried puzzling this out we looked at one post’s page and the post made up 28% of the page’s text, the other 72% of the text was this sidebar stuff, which appears on every page of the blog. So I thought perhaps this is causing a dupe content issue, so I killed the sidebars.
As far as Butch Dixon is concerned, my traffic is rock solid. It’s like a flat line and doesn’t vary. I have heaps of webmasters stealing my site’s text, but I also produce blog text for them, which most affiliates use. This blog text does not appear on my site at all except for on the webmaster page, which is in a robots excluded area of my site.
From that first description it sounds like you found the cause, but it certainly looks like the update affected you on the 13th. I’ve seen a couple of reports of this now, from others seeing the same thing on the same date.
Have you seen any change since the 13th? Perhaps it’s just a little Google dancing after the update?
As for the affiliates, it’s an interesting concept that I proposed to one sponsor, and I think they’ve taken the right precaution and now include a warning about original content and duplicate sponsor copy in their emails.
I know I sound like a scratched record when it comes to this, but if so many affiliates just copy and paste, their sponsors could see a sudden loss of traffic from them as their sites are affected. If affiliates are seeing their traffic drop on the 13th, sponsors who rely heavily on affiliate sales have probably seen that drop transfer to them on the 13th too.
I guess it depends how closely guys monitor their traffic, but I do wonder how many sponsors might check their stats at the end of the month and see that sudden drop too as a result of their affiliates.
[QUOTE=conran;92754]I have a few blogs out there, and a few months ago I added a new blog to try to gage the effect of duplicate content. Obviously information on it is hard to find, so I wanted to try to see the effects myself and gain a few hard facts.
I started a blog with 100% duplicate content. The blog began with only sponsor provided text, approximately 100 words for each post.
But as the Panda update hit in the US I wondered what it would be like if a blogger suddenly changed tack and started writing unique content. So I mixed it up a little.
Bearing in mind this was a relatively new blog, so traffic was low, I didn’t mind so much if it was completely destroyed.
So I slightly forgot to check in on it in the past couple of weeks and did so tonight, and you know what I found? Traffic was climbing, right up until April 12th. On the 13th traffic plummeted by 91%.
It has risen again to a modest and stable level, but nothing close to what it was.[/QUOTE]
UGH! Would you please show your data? I’m coming to the conclusion that you don’t get enough traffic to say much of anything - that it’s all just the random variation you see with small amounts of data and your reading meaning into random noise. Never once have you included a graph from Google Analytics, and without those graphs there’s nothing substantive for other people to comment on.
I’ve been doing the experiment you’re talking about for a year a half now with a “real men” blog that I started using RSS feeds (it’s been a low priority and looks like shit - I’m almost ashamed to link to it). It did a lot of nothing and never got traction in Google. So I deleted all the low quality posts (most of what was on the site), and completely rewrote the posts that had some potential and then added new posts to the mix. Still not much of anything, though I only had about 50 posts on it. I’ve sorta neglected the blog this year and looking at the stats it started getting a little traffic from Google and then started going back down again - possibly 'cause I wasn’t posting on it regularly. I’ve got 34 draft posts that need to go up on it - so it’ll be interesting to see if it resurrects and starts performing when I start doing regular posts. I’ve always worried that I killed the domain with all the low quality, duplicate content when it started.
As I said in the OP this is a new blog, so obviously I’m not getting high traffic on it. And it was duplicate content too (mostly) so that’s not really surprising. What is surprising is the marked drop in stats for that day. Nowhere else in the stats is that kind of drop seen, on any of my sites, some of which are over two years old.
There’s plenty for others to comment on, specifically whether they saw any change on the 13th and if so what their thoughts were on that. Which is what I asked. I don’t feel I need to add pretty pictures for your benefit when we’re discussing a general subject.
I don’t know why you have such a problem with me. What’s the deal, did I piss on your BBQ in a former life or something?
[QUOTE=conran;92798]As I said in the OP this is a new blog, so obviously I’m not getting high traffic on it. And it was duplicate content too (mostly) so that’s not really surprising. What is surprising is the marked drop in stats for that day. Nowhere else in the stats is that kind of drop seen, on any of my sites, some of which are over two years old.
There’s plenty for others to comment on, specifically whether they saw any change on the 13th and if so what their thoughts were on that. Which is what I asked. I don’t feel I need to add pretty pictures for your benefit when we’re discussing a general subject.[/QUOTE]
So, you were getting what? 25 visits from Google and now you’re getting 2? PLEASE… That’s not enough data to have any statistical significance. If you had started 50 automated blogs and your combined visits went from 1250 to 100 - that would have some significance.
Bottom line - lay off the analytics until you have enough data to draw meaningful conclusions. You really can’t say much of anything without sufficient numbers.
And lastly, graphs from Google Analytics are not pretty pictures - they’re data. You’re wasting our time unless you give us adequate data to understand the full picture of what your talking about.
I’m also not sure that affiliates using sponsor written content is actually bad for the sponsor.
Extra Big Dicks is sitting at 13 for “big dicks” and if you google any of their paragraphs of text for the updates on their site, you’ll see lots of sites copy them word for word.
I know this also happens with Butch Dixon, which is why I started providing blog text that was different. But it still happens.
Also, the premise that it’s bad for the sponsor doesn’t really make sense to me. Now I know that Google doesn’t have to make sense, but it just doesn’t seem right that a site puts up a page with unique content, then 30 people come along and steal your text and use it on their site, and then you get penalized for their misuse of your content.
Wouldn’t that be like Ford being charged for the murder of someone killed in a drive-by simply because the killer drove a Ford?
if people steal your text off of your blog or site then they are chronologically behind you with publishing the content… imagine google indexing all sites on the internet with a timestamp then comparing the pages with all other pages to find duplicates… I would take the first occurance timewise in my database as the original content…
The primary area of worry - I think - is for those who rely on affiliates for the majority of income.
If you have 100 affiliates and 99 of them are using the supplied copy, this update could lower the traffic that 98 of those are receiving because their site is mostly (if not completely) duplicate content. If the traffic of the majority of your affiliates drops, then the surfers they are directing to you will fall too of course.
If they were all writing original text it increases the chances of appearing in search results for relevant terms rather than a large % of it being ignored because it’s all over the net.
The duplicate content issue for sponsors when it comes to their own site is caused by affiliates publishing every day using the site copy and are therefore crawled by Google more frequently than the sponsor site, which updates once a week. How does Google decide which version is the original and which is the copy?
In most cases, it seems that they choose the first crawled copy of that content, which is usually an affiliate blog or tube because their crawling schedule is more frequent than that of the sponsor.
It certainly seems likely that if content is routinely found on blogs and tubes before it is found on the sponsor site, that originating site will be seen as the duplicate. It’s not fair, but how can Google know who wrote the content other than where they saw it first?
There are ways to get around this though, primarily through supplying completely different versions of text to affiliates by region, thereby diluting the duplicate content problem, making sure the content used on the site is not the same as that being sent out to any affiliates, and by going after those who copy/paste the content from your site - which is protected under copyright.
No affiliate should be using the content you publish on your primary site at all.
I’m sure someone will be along any moment to say how completely wrong I am. But let me clarify that these are my opinions based on what I know about how Google crawls, classifies and presents the pages they find.
WOW, sure are a lot of assumptions being made in this thread. And some are based on vastly different amounts of traffic, on traffic quality as well. Some are just pushing their own business model but hey, that’s what it is about, making cash. Thing with all this, is simple, we can only guess at what Google does. Some of those guesses are more informed, than others, but hey, that is the dynamics of SE Guessing. I think I’ll stick to my Ostrich approach. whistle
[QUOTE=conran;92817]The primary area of worry - I think - is for those who rely on affiliates for the majority of income.
If you have 100 affiliates and 99 of them are using the supplied copy, this update could lower the traffic that 98 of those are receiving because their site is mostly (if not completely) duplicate content. If the traffic of the majority of your affiliates drops, then the surfers they are directing to you will fall too of course.
If they were all writing original text it increases the chances of appearing in search results for relevant terms rather than a large % of it being ignored because it’s all over the net.
The duplicate content issue for sponsors when it comes to their own site is caused by affiliates publishing every day using the site copy and are therefore crawled by Google more frequently than the sponsor site, which updates once a week. How does Google decide which version is the original and which is the copy?[/QUOTE]
I don’t think that the “duplicate content” issue is a severe a penalty as you characterize it. Search for almost any book - and Amazon.com lands at or near the top. Do you think they worry about affiliates and duplicate content? They have tons of affiliates, and their content is quoted all over the place.
I would think that a pay site is going to have an upper hand due to the vast number of incoming links go to it. And if you want to help yourself, make sure the spiders do not follow your affiliate links.
Amazon and Bing have said that they “try” to take affiliate links into account in their algorithm, scraping sites, etc. That being said, I do not think its a sponsor’s job to teach affiliates SEO marketing. That’s what they are paid to do.
Yeah, I think the duplicate content thing is kind of like the story of Chicken Little. Google said one day that they like original content, then someone added to it, and another added his bit, now we’re talking about penalties and all kinds of things. The sky is falling! It becomes pretty hard to separate the fact from the SEO-enthusiast added bits.
Duplicate content is a huge problem for search engines. Just think about when a company puts out a press release through something like PRNewswire - it gets picked up by thousands of websites. Google then has to figure out which of those thousands of pages are the ones it should keep in it’s index. And that’s not even a spammer - that’s legit duplicate content.
If you ignore duplicate content issues you’re basically trusting google will “just figure it out”. That’s a recipe for not getting the result you want.
GayPornEngine.com, lost 35% of all Google Traffic… yet this site has only got 30 pages indexed, each page is 100% unique with a lot of backlinks and no outgoing links.
BostonBoyz.com, was not affected at all, even if I have not updated the site for 2+ years and it has NO unique content.
My conclusion is, Google have no fucking idea what they are doing. But I don’t really have any “spam” sites as such (depends on how you look at it though…), so not sure how they are affected by this update. If it means this update have removed a majority of spam, then that’s good… but I doubt it has, I still see the same sites at the top as before.
It became abundantly clear that Panda does not work by filtering out individual low quality content as was originally implied. It works by punishing entire domain names if an undetermined percentage of the content on that site meets the undefined “low-quality” criteria. Soon after we came to this realization, Google confirmed it in a statement to Search Engine Land, and an interview with WIRED.
I like this guys comment:
“Now that Panda/Farmer has been rolled out to all corners of the globe, I think that we are going to be seeing a lot more SERP indiscretions, anomalies, and blatant search injustices. This is a very interesting post as it highlights the vast inadequacies of Googles Panda/Farmer update and that it isn’t the great saviour from weak content SERPs that had been proposed all along. Too many strong sites with fresh and original content have taken massive knocks. Only time will tell, but honestly I think that we have been sold up river by Google and that there is a disguised motive behind the update that lingers in the higher echelons of the Googleplex.”
