SEO Experts: What constitues duplicate content
 

Just took a major hit on one of my sites from a top 5 ranking to barely in the top 100 for an extremely popular keyword, I am thinking duplicate content(the only other change is I am adding new pages everyday now) may be the issue as I have several similar sites that all update roughly the same info daily.

So what constitutes duplicate content? Exact phrases? Similar content? Duplicate image names? what?

Check your site here:

http://www.copyscape.com/

I was about to post the same thing :thumbsup

Found nothing but the 2257 requirement crap on 5 other sites, none of them mine, so thats probably not it, well, I would hope Google wouldn't penalize me for required text.

Its all very strange because this all started the same week I started a new site, similar but not duplicate by any means.

Duplicate content would be sentences that are the same, I think.

From what google has to say about it that is about right, but they are so freakin' ambiguous it is really hard to tell unless you have experienced it first hand.

What do you "think" duplicate content is?

:thumbsup
yup, just use common sense :2 cents:

google makes many tests, you gotto think long term

I do SEO the old fashioned way.

http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/blog/w...perchase14.jpg

If were only that simple...

It is, SEO isn't rocket science. Its Search Engine Optimization.

You failed to answer the question. It was a serious question.

Dont care too much, just dont be stupid. Duplicate content penalties are so exaggerated.

Feeds
 

If sponsors were smart wouldn't they all have morphing feeds? I try to use all morphing but sometimes all they give is the basic feed.... seems like it would be way worth it to invest.

If you can show me a good morphing feed in adult that regularly updates and isn't considered duplicate content I'd be impressed.

Ok, even though I know this is a trick question. :winkwink:

Duplicate content to me is not just exact copies, though that is definitely a form of it. For example text is not the only concern when it comes to duplicate content, image names, alt tags, title tags, if my understanding is correct those are counted towards dup content as well. So there is one form.

Another example for me is similar text, Google incorporates a thesaurus in their search, it only seems to reason that they would do the same when looking for dup content, though I hope it is a much less loosely applied. The reason I even consider this is because Google cites "appreciably similar" content when speaking of duplicate content.

I could go on, I have a list but those are the two major. And yes, I know I if this is what I think dup content is I should avoid these and I do, but I am thinking I am missing something as well.

Ok I'm not sure, maybe i just like the idea.. not sure how they work

if that was the case, chances are the new site would be the one penalized. not the original one.

Do you have the domains on the same IPs?
Google could theoretically even penalize you if the IPs are similar. Who knows...

agreed.

in fact i seem to recall recently that one of the google techs coming out and stating that duplicate content penalties dont exist at all. how can you control someone copying your website? you cant. to penalize a person for something out of their control is totally wack!

Just took a major hit on one of my sites from a top 5 ranking to barely in the top 100 for an extremely popular keyword, I am thinking duplicate content(the only other change is I am adding new pages everyday now) may be the issue as I have several similar sites that all update roughly the same info daily.

So what constitutes duplicate content? Exact phrases? Similar content? Duplicate image names? what?

By the wording of your title I knew you have been visiting the google board. Most over there are only going to frustrate you.

One guy over there hit my problem exactly and within days my placement returned.

I have spent hours reading over different penalty reasons and know most of the reasons the google whores post about. Duplicate content is always there first check

its possible, there are only 5 domains on that ip.

Something is definitely going on though, searching google for the name of the site, which is the exact same thing as the domain and it comes up somewhere between 50-70 in the results, the other site, the newest one comes, up #1 like it is supposed to.

You can't be for sure that is the problem. You could have taken a hit because of something else, like low quality. Believe it or not, that can make a big difference, both ways. If you get a quality bonus it can shoot you to the top. But that's another subject all together.

As far as I can tell, duplicate content is basically exact content HOWEVER what most people don't know is, they think they are being slick by using sponsor content only on their website and renaming it and Google won't know but what they don't know is it only takes 1 person to report that site and if someone else ranks below them in the search engines for the same keyword, and you know that site that is above you is doing that, wouldn't you report them just to make your site go up and theirs go down? Of course you would.

So long story short, let's say you have a nice little website and all you have on there is a bunch of affiliate galleries. Google will punish you like there is no tomorrow for that. I don't care what you rename the files, it won't matter. They know it's affiliate content and that is why you have to make an effort to be TRULY UNIQUE.

I looked at your website - well the link in your signature and seen it's pretty much the same crap as at every other site so as you have your website design right now, of course you are going to be hit for a penalty and rightfully so.

You probably also got a high bounce rate penalty too.

What makes your site unique from the 1400 trillion other sites out there offering the same shit?

Is any of your content unique?
Do you make any effort at all to provide SOMETHING - ANYTHING different and special?

Without meaning to be mean, you are what they call a waste of google space. You are a spammer. Your site has no socially redeeming value in terms of search engine value. You have someone else's content (legally or not doesn't matter to Google) and make some new site with the same content as easily found on 10 bazillion other sites.

And as such you provide the Google surfers nothing new or unique in value and that is very probably what gave you the big hit.

Is there really nothing you can think of that might make your site different and unique? Haven't affiliate content on it's own isn't a automatic dooms day with search engines however having only that crap is. You need to think outside the box and start think of EXTRA things you can do that makes your site different.

Start improving the quality of your site. Start thinking of other things you can offer to your surfers so they will want to hang at your site more and I think you'll start to find you'll do better in the search engines as well.

You don't really think I would be worried about a tube site ranking in google do you? LOL

No, both sites in question are review sites.

Each and every post on the WP review site and the custom CMS is unique, in that it they are hand written and changed drastically from review site to review site. New reviews added to each daily. There are no place holder pages(incomplete reviews) and each site carries different ways to rank a site, adding to the uniqueness of each site. The only real common factor is the same site is reviewed on each site on the same day, obviously when reviewing the same site on two different domains the content is going to be slightly similar.

The site in question has been ranked in the top 5 for a very extremely popular gay porn term since July. It also held the number one spot for its name, which got it a lot of google search traffic as well, so I have not considered it as not providing any value to surfers, its relevant, unique and carries almost no sponsor content. 2 images and a video usually, the rest is SEO text that reads natural. But it now name ranks 65, for some odd reason and the term it held the top five for its not even in the top 100 as of an hour ago.

Getting slaped by Google hurts more than when my mom slapped me as a kid!

Actually I hadn't been reading over there. See post above this one, you'll understand why I cited Dup content first.

Not to question your method, but don't you think running gay and straight content through the same tube a little offputting for most straight porn surfers? I see as much cock on cock on your index as I do straight vids. If I were lookign to beat my dick on a tube site and came across yours, I would probably move on down the line to the next.

Having a gay section on a general porn website is one thing, tossing it into the mix with the rest of the content, doesn't really flow...

Go deeper into the site if you can(someone mentioned earlier my trade script was screwing up). After you view your first vid you get redirected to one of my other tubes either a straight pay tube or a gay pay tube depending on what that video was. That site isn't for ppl looking for free porn, it has a greater purpose in life. Getting surfers in there and then weeding out the free loaders, so the bounce rate is going to be high, I give only one vid away for free :winkwink:

edit I had to disable the trade script, it really was fucked!

duplicate content is a myth in terms of the penalty and i have hundreds of sites that back that up..

i have felt the google slap in the past 2 months and i can tell you with 100% certainty that there are a couple things that you can do to get back to your prior position within a week or two of getting slapped..

and no, i am not going to tell you what they are, but i will say that google is looking for fresh unique content....

Really?? You feel you are penalized by google and you didn't check out their free forum?

Either way, this thread is meaningless without your site and keyword.

Well I was a little worried about going over there and saying hey can you figure out why I got slapped on my GAY PORN site. Haven't dealt with the crowd over there before and assumed they were like a lot of other places. Apparently I wrongly assumed?

Meaningless or not I'm not posting the keyword or the domain. :winkwink:

Fair enough. But unless your keyword is illegal in some fashion I don't see why not.

There is a million ways to get ranked for a word, ie gay men, yours aint new.

But like I said, you will never get your answer here or elsewhere if you don't post your site and keyword.

I notice a dramatic difference in duplicate content titles more then the content. On a very small scale mind you but I do notice it.

I have noticed on some of my more heavily visited sites that for news feeds, they create their own page on my site via the rss every hour, they don't get cached by google at all, but all my original content does.

They will randomly pull in SE traffic on certain days, but for the most part don't even get listed in related serps.

So for instance one of my sites has around 14,000(17,000ish total) pages made from the RSS feeds, but only 3000 cached in google that return results. All 3000 (just under actually) are 2000 word + unique articles, plus forums, social etc..

So I havent had any penalty from them, it seems that google realizes this is useful info to my users but at the same time I get no "weight" for it.

just my :2 cents:

edit: by dramatic and small scale in the first line, which contradict each other, I just mean It's day and night, but also not like I get alot from it. Change = a little . duplicate title = nothing much but a SE bot basically

There are NO duplicate content PENALTIES! Supplemental pages won't benefit you but they won't hurt you either.

Now that is definitely a possibility there. Its a review site, you can't change the name of the site being reviewed and it really has to be in the title, although I do change up the unimportant words in the title.

mmcfadden, reading over there now, a lot of ppl got slapped about the same time other than that nothing is jumping out at me.

Basically what I was trying to say in allot less words :1orglaugh

But I talk to a lot of people that are always worried about getting penalized for simple things like that.

Also, pretty much anything you could do to a competitors website are myth "penalties" too, like for instance, using auto forum poster to spam 1500 forums in one night with your competitor's url. People would abuse the shit out of this and it would be war. Many things come into play overall and google knows which sites to give the G! love too.

Just like if I wanted to hurt someone with duplicate content, I would take there article/content each day and spread it around every article directory etc.. make blogs at all the free ones, post the content there etc..

it dont hurt but it dont help either.

Ya, of course it depends on what it is, also, the title has to match the content right. In your case,the exact site name.

but for instance a little while back, I saw allot of people using this one article "spinning" tool, but it kept the same title, i think that got fixed i forget as i dont use em, , and jumbled the words or replaced them, you all know the ones.

one original article on a site a month is worth more then the "ideal" number per day and by ideal i mean that magic number of dup pages per day that g! tolerates, you can't just have a site pulling hundreds of articles per hour, even with new titles, I mean sure it might pull in shortterm traffic per day on hot keywords for the magic numbered dup articles pages, but for the sites i see that are hundreds of junk rss feed content per day, unless you got some strong backlinks for those keywords, I don't see too much... all in my experience anyways.