• Diagnose why your site dropped in the rankings, and;
• Recover your site’s rankings in Google

Majestic SEO's main search screen

Majestic SEO's report dashboard

Anchor text counts sorted from largest to smallest

Next, use the pie graph option (on Excel’s “insert” menu) to create a visual pie graph of your data.

 

Anchor text visualized on a pie graph

Domains sorted by anchor text

You should now have a clear picture of who you need to reach out to in an attempt to get your links removed.

Step 4: Start contacting webmasters

Now that you know what domains are harboring the majority of your offending links, you need to reach out to them, one by one, and politely ask them to remove the links they have to your site. Often, if there are hundreds or thousands of links to your site from a single domain, it means your website is in a footer, sidebar, blogroll, or other site-wide link. This type of link is easily removed by the webmaster, provided they actually heed your request.

Conclusion

I hope this guide on recovering your rankings from the recent Panda/Penguin/webspam algorithm updates has been helpful. If you find it useful, leave a message in the comments!

Brace for impact. As I write this, Google is rolling out the latest rendition of its Panda algorithm — Panda 3.5 (Editor’s note: Now being called “Penguin”). Here’s Google’s official announcement:

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.

It seems to be up for debate right now as to whether this is an update of Google’s Panda algorithm (ie, Panda 3.5) or whether it’s a standalone update. Either way, In this post my goal is to provide an in-depth analysis on the following:

• What Google’s saying in its announcement
• How Panda 3.5 is affecting search results
• How to recover from Panda 3.5
• Other possible repercussions of Google’s latest algorithm change
• My analysis on Google’s real purpose for rolling out this algorithm change

The opposite of “white hat” SEO is something called “black hat webspam” (we say “webspam” to distinguish it from email spam). In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.

The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. We also want the “good guys” making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded.

Google's example of keyword stuffing

Google's example of link spam

The change will go live for all languages at the same time. For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice.

So, we’re left with a lot of questions:

• What did Google Panda 3.4 change?
• I was hit by Panda 3.4; How can I recover?
• Why is Google being such a b#%&@ lately?

What did Google Panda 3.4 Change?

Obviously, it’s only been a few days since Google Panda 3.4 was released, so the fallout is still manifesting as Google’s data centers refresh. I’ve done a lot of scoping around, trying to get opinions from other folks about what exactly changed in Panda 3.4, but thus far it doesn’t look like anyone is really willing to venture a guess as to what happened. So these observations are based solely on my interpretation of the ranking changes I’ve seen across the hundred or so websites on which I have ranking and analytics data. Google Panda 3.4 appears to be a revision and update to the changes made in Google Panda 3.3, which shows continued aggression by Google against unnatural link building.

As I stated in my previous post about Google Panda 3.3, here are the specific unnatural link building signals that Google is looking for and devaluing with the most recent revisions of Panda, including 3.4:

• Too many exact-match anchor text links.  As webmasters (or SEOs), we want the most bang for our buck. This often results in us obsessing over getting links using the exact anchor text of the keyword we want to rank well for. This used to work really well, but Panda 3.3 and 3.4 have changed that. Previous to Panda 3.3, it was ideal to aim for around 40% exact-match anchor text links (as a percentage of your overall inbound link profile), but now the ideal figure is probably closer to 5-10%.

• Not enough junk anchors, LSI anchors, brand anchors, and naked URL anchors. I touched on this point in my previous post, but I wanted to expand on what each of these terms means, since they are so essential now.
• Junk anchor text, also known as “universal anchor text” is anchor text that’s not keyword-rich, and could be used for any website, or any niche. Common examples of junk anchor text includes “click here”, “visit this website”, “learn more”, etc. It’s important to use junk anchor text because it looks natural to Google, since most normal folks use that kind of language when they link to another website.
• LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) anchors are comprised of keywords related to, synonymous with, or similar to your target keyword. For instance, if your target keyword is “dog training,” then some LSI anchors would include “training for dogs,” “training for your dog”, “how to train your dog”, “teaching your dog to do tricks”, etc. A great way to find LSI anchors for your particular keyword is to use Google’s free keyword tool. These are important to use because it’s unnatural for many people from many websites to just happen to link to your website with the same anchor text. It’s much more likely (and, therefore, natural) to link using a wide variety of anchor text. The only exception to this is with brand anchors and naked URLs.
• Brand anchors are comprised of keywords that include your brand or company name. For example, if your company name is “Jayson’s Dog Training”, then examples of brand anchors would include “Jayson’s Dog Training,” “Jaysons dog training,” “Jason’s Dog Training,” “Dog training tips at Jayson’s Dog Training”, “Learn to train your dog at Jayson’s Dog Training,” etc.  Brand anchors are commonly used to link to company homepages, so it makes more sense for them to link to your homepage rather than internal pages. However, variety is necessary (and natural), so I recommend ensuring that a few brand anchors point to your internal pages as well.
• Naked URLs are anchors that are comprised of variations of your website’s URL. For example, for AudienceBloom.com, here are some naked URL anchors: “audiencebloom.com”, “http://www.audiencebloom.com”, “www.audiencebloom.com”, “http://audiencebloom.com”. Naked URLs can also link to internal pages of a site, in addition to the website homepage.
• Not enough social signals. Clearly, Google is on a mission to strip webmasters and SEOs of their power when it comes to manipulating Google’s search engine rankings. Before Panda 3.3, the easiest way to do this was to build lots of inbound links with anchor text including your target keyword. After Panda 3.3 and 3.4, link building still provides the vast majority of the power we wield, but it has been significantly weakened. Google knows that, in order to strip webmasters and SEOs of their power in ranking manipulation, it needs to stop relying on inbound links and start relying more on other signals which are harder to control and game. So far, it looks like Google is turning to social signals as a potential escape from inbound links.Social signals include bookmarks from sites like Delicious and Stumbleupon, votes from social news sites like Digg and Reddit, and votes from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Google knows that when a particular URL or website is being tweeted a lot, or shared on Facebook or Google+, it’s likely to be popular. Google wants to display popular sites at the top of its search results, so it uses these social signals in its algorithm to help determine ranking placement.After Panda 3.3 and 3.4, it’s more important than ever to have lots of inbound social signals.  The best way to get inbound social signals is to do the following:

1. Create a Facebook page, Twitter account, and Google+ page
2. Make sure your website visitors can connect with you on these channels by including “Connect” links on your website
3. Publish rich, quality onsite content and broadcast your newly-published content via these channels.

• Why did my site lose rankings?
• What do I need to do to recover?

Now that the dust has settled, we have some answers as to what happened with your rankings, as well as how to recover.

What happened:

Your site was hit by Panda 3.3, the latest iteration of Google’s Panda algorithm. Panda 3.3 was rolled out between 2/18 and 2/27.

Who was affected by Panda 3.3?

• Larger sites that had long held rankings in their niche for years
• Strong authority sites with active or historic link building

What is Panda 3.3?

Panda 3.3 is the latest iteration of Google’s Panda algorithm. It specifically targeted unnatural link profiles. It’s not a ranking penalty; rather it’s a loss of rankings due to decreased value of the inbound links pointing to your site. The inbound links were devalued due to a change in the way Google assesses inbound links. Here’s Google’s statement on what changed:

“Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.”

Here’s the link:
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html

Additionally, Panda 3.3:

• Placed more emphasis on social media, and inbound links from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
• Placed more emphasis on onsite content matching up with the source page content of the link
• Placed more emphasis on the content on source page in order to determine relevance of the outbound link

Why your site was hit:

Google looks for patterns that can be programmatically identified and enforced. You were hit because your site fit that pattern; your site wasn’t hand selected or “penalized.” Too many of your inbound links had “exact match” anchor text, meaning that the anchor text of the links was exactly the keywords you were trying to rank for. SEOs and link builders have historically built lots of exact-match anchor text links because exact-match anchor text has always carried a heavy weight in the ranking algorithm. Now, after Panda 3.3, that weight has been significantly reduced. As such, the value of these links was reduced.

Additionally, Google appears to have implemented a threshold for “too many” exact match anchor text links. When Google deems there to be too many exact-match anchor texts for a particular keyword, it will significantly reduce the value of all of those links. This is worrisome because it opens up the doors to “Negative SEO” or attack-tactics. It’s now presumably possible to “tank” your competitors by building links to their websites with over-optimized exact match anchor text. I hope Google will realize this and try to prevent it from happening, because as of right now, it appears to be possible. If Google doesn’t correct this, I expect to see mercenary “Negative SEO” companies start to sprout up and offer services of tanking competitors out of the rankings.

Here are two things to specifically look for when reviewing your inbound link profile:

1) Your link profile might not have enough brand-name anchors. Anchor text that is your brand name or variations of it are one signal to Google of a natural link profile.

2) Another element of a natural-looking link profile is what’s called “junk” anchor text, LSI anchor text, and naked URLs. These are anchors that say “click here”, “here”, “Website”, “yoururl.com”, “www.yoururl.com”, etc. LSI anchor text are related terms to your target keywords. Google looks for these anchors in backlink profiles as a signal of a natural link profile since most folks link to other sites that way.

What you need to do to recover from Panda 3.3:

• To recover from Panda 3.3, you need a link building campaign that includes anchor text with lots of variation, including lots of brand-name anchors, LSIs, junk anchors, and naked URL anchors. You need to continue this until the scales are “tipped back” in your favor and the ratios of exact-match anchors are brought down. When the ratios drop below the threshold (whatever that threshold may be), you will regain some of the value of your links.
• You need to revisit the textual content on your website and ensure that it uses your keywords for which you’d like to rank well, in addition to variations of those keywords.
• Make the following changes to your link building campaign to counter and adapt to this algorithm change:
  • Vastly increase the amount and variation of anchor text that you use to build inbound links to your site, and increase the usage of brand name anchors, naked URL anchors, junk anchors and LSI anchors.
  • Add in a social component so that your site will receive inbound links from social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Delicious, and more.

Have I permanently lost all value from the links that were built before Panda 3.3 hit?

Probably not. Once the scales are tipped back in your favor with a strategic link building campaign that consists of plenty of the anchor types I outlined above, the value from your previously-built links should be restored.

How long will it take?

If the scales were only slightly tipped, it could take as few as 2-3 weeks. I would expect it to take 2-4 months on average, with extreme cases requiring 6-8 months of link building work.

I hope this guide helps you conquer and reverse the hit from Google Panda 3.3! Was your site hit by Panda? Let us know in the comments!

• Increased Website traffic
• Increased Brand Awareness
• Increased Sales

But SEO offers unique benefits in addition to those offered by SEM. In this article I’ll describe the unique benefits of SEO, compare them to SEM, and make the case for why SEO is more valuable, profitable, and sustainable.

Are you building up equity, or just paying rent?

A Website is a lot like real estate, and SEO is a lot like building equity in your property. In fact, I like to call SEO “Google Equity” because it really is the process of building up your value & trust in the eyes of Google (and other search engines, too). For every dollar you spend on SEO, you build up long-term value, just like paying a mortgage when you buy real-estate.

In contrast, SEM is a lot like renting a house. You pay to rent ad space in order to get traffic NOW, delivering short-term benefits only, with no long-term benefits. It’s like paying rent for the short-term benefit of living there now, but those dollars are not building you any sort of long-term equity in the house.

SEO Benefit #1: The gift that keeps on giving

Perhaps the biggest unique benefit of SEO is the fact that your efforts in the past never stop providing benefits in the future. A good SEO campaign focuses on building links to your Website, because one factor of SEO is your Website’s inbound link profile, which is the comprehensive picture of all the places on the Web that link to your Website, along with various factors related to those links, such as anchor text, link source, etc. When a search engine calculates your rankings in the SERPs, it looks at your inbound link profile as part of the determining algorithm. It considers many details of this profile, one of which is the age of the links contained within. Are there links that have been “live” for a long time? How long? The more, the better. So, dollars spent on SEO result in short-term as well as long-term benefits.

This differs greatly from SEM because SEM does not build any links to your Website. If you’re running a Google Adwords campaign, your Website will have links that appear in the sidebar of Google’s search results page, as well as contextual links appearing across Google’s opt-in advertiser network (Google’s Adsense program), but these links are advertiser links, and aren’t counted in your inbound link profile. When you turn off your SEM campaign, all the links disappear, and no benefits remain.

SEO Benefit #2: By strengthening yourself, you weaken the competition

The second unique benefit of SEO is that it can actually decrease sales for your competitors at the same time as it increases your sales. Consider, for example, that you’re trying to rank well for a keyword, but your main competitor ranks #1 for it in the SERPs. You initiate an SEO campaign, and within several months, you overtake your competitor for the #1 spot. You reap the benefits of a flood of new, targeted traffic coming in to your Website, but do you realize that you have also significantly decreased your competitor’s traffic for that keyword?

We know from a Cornell University study that the #1 search result in Google gets about 56.36% of the total clicks. The #2 search result gets about 13.45%. So by overtaking your competitor and pushing them down in the rankings, you significantly decrease their traffic for your target keyword. You effectively siphon their traffic (read: revenue) stream away from them and give it to your own business. By strengthening yourself, you weaken the competition.

This contrasts from SEM because SEM doesn’t harm your competitors. With SEM, you simply share ad space with your competitors.

SEO Benefit #3: Non-search engine traffic adds up

The third unique benefit of SEO is the incremental traffic gains you’ll see as a result of your SEO linkbuilding campaign. Popular, highly-trafficked websites such as EzineArticles.com and Buzzle.com are often used for linkbuilding in an SEO campaign. Each of these Websites get millions of visitors per year, and many of these visitors will click through to your Website (via the link from the linkbuilding campaign) without ever touching the search engines, and you won’t pay a dime for it.

This differs from SEM because all visitors to your Website will come from commercial ad placements in either the search engines or opt-in advertisers on the advertising network, and you’ll be charged for each click on your ad. There is no residual, free traffic.

SEO and SEM are both highly effective online marketing strategies. But once the shroud of mystery is removed from SEO and its benefits become clear, it’s easy to see why I believe SEO is the king of online marketing strategies. SEM has its place in the world of online marketing, but SEO should be every company’s top internet marketing priority.

Invest in your property. If you’re not doing SEO, you’re only paying rent.

During my day gig, I work full-time at a media company where my primary duty is lead-gen. This puts me in charge of the entire lead capture process, including:

• Writing marketing copy
• Identifying the appropriate target market & segmenting the list
• Optimizing the email open rate
• Optimizing the email click-through rate
• Optimizing the conversion rate (after click)

Over the years I’ve seen it all, and I’ve done it all, across various markets ranging from IT professionals to higher education to dog lovers. I’ve tried experiments that failed miserably and I’ve tried ones that had wild success. I’ve run tests on broadcasts in the hundreds of thousands, approaching millions of recipients. And what I’ve found is that you can really boil down your email template into two main categories: With images, and without images.

Think of the marketing emails you get. You probably see ones formatted both ways. And depending on what email client you’re using, you’ll see it differently. I use gmail for all my personal emails, but for my day gig I use Outlook. Let’s take a look at how some marketing emails look in my Outlook client.

First, take a look at this beauty:

Work of art, isn’t it? This looks more like it belongs on failblog. Let’s see what happens when I download the images:

OK, that looks better.

In reality, getting a good response from an email broadcast parallels best practices for conversion funnels. In a nutshell, you want your prospective lead to take the shortest path possible to converting; the path of least resistance. If I have to click “download images” just to see what this email is trying to tell me, that’s one step that’s going to cut out a sizeable chunk of potential leads. In today’s email age, there are just too many other emails to get through; I’m not going to download images for each one and cross my fingers that there’s something good inside.

Now, let’s take a look at a template that contains no images:

Well hey, that’s not bad. Not pretty, but not bad, right? You can see what the email is about, the benefits are clear, and you don’t have to download any images to see what’s going on.

Here’s the cold truth: Pretty and high-conversion rate do not go together (when we’re talking email broadcasts). So, what makes a broadcast successful?

Simplicity.

Give your prospective lead the easiest possible path to converting and you increase the likelihood that they will. Cleanly and succinctly describe the benefits that they’ll get from taking the action you want them to take (ie, registering for a Webinar or downloading a white paper). Don’t try to melt their heart with cute graphics.

Now, let’s take a look at some real data from my testing. Just how much more effective is a simple, plain-text email compared to one laden with pretty graphics?

To test this, I compared two templates, each sent to over 30,000 recipients. These both had the same subject line and copy; the only difference was the presence of images in one.

Here’s split A (No images):

And here’s split B (with images):

I had to go digging through my archives for this email creative, so the top banner image is displaying incorrectly for whatever reason, and the image of the white paper asset (in the right sidebar) has since been removed from the server. I have no idea where those images are now, so you’ll just have to imagine what it looked like.

Here are the results of the test:

Split A (Text Only)

Delivered: 30,228
Open Rate: 13.67%
Click Rate: 14.16%
Unique Clicks: 495
Total Leads: 280

Split B (Text and Images)

Delivered: 30,228
Open Rate: 11.55%
Click Rate: 11.63%
Unique Clicks: 350
Total Leads: 216

As you can see, Split A (no images) generated 29.6% more leads than Split B.

Today’s lessons:

• Go for Simplicity.
• Pretty and high-conversion don’t go well together (in email marketing).
• Always use three bullet points, even if you don’t have something valid to say in the third one.

He said that, particularly after the Farmer algorithm update, this could do more harm than good.

Needless to say, getting advice from a consultant for Google’s algorithm was enough to change my mind. I immediately emailed my VA from my iPhone and told her to stop submitting all my content to EzineArticles. She was able to undo all the submissions before they were approved, so they never went live on EZA’s Website.

I am still intrigued by this debate, however, as there’s no denying that IF you could syndicate your exact content for backlinks without worrying about negative side effects, you could save a HUGE amount of money on content creation expenses. So I’ve decided to conduct the test on a much smaller scale. Perhaps it was too ambitious of me to start with a 100+ page Website full of unique content for which I spent a lot of money and time creating.

I’ll conduct the test, but it’ll be with a smaller, 10-20 page Website. I need to do this to definitively answer my own question.

Over the last week I had a very intriguing conversation with Troy, one of the authors over at Article Submission Review. I have copied the conversation below because I think it’s an intelligent look at both sides of the duplicate content-syndication debate:

On March 2, 2011 Jayson wrote:
I’m struggling to understand one important aspect of this change. How does Google define “unique” content? Will a Website with 100 pages of original content be penalized if the Webmaster distributes all 100 pages of content through channels such as EZA and blog networks?

Obviously, the content would not be “unique” anymore as it would be syndicated to various Websites. But I can’t see Google penalizing the original site for that. I mean, if it were possible to negatively affect rankings with offsite tactics like that, SEO companies would all be like mercenaries torpedoing each other’s competitors down. Mike and Troy, what’s your take?

On March 8, 2011 Troy wrote:

Hi Jayson,

What Google was going after with the duplicate content was scrapers – people that scrape the content from one site (usually an article directory that syndicates the content) and then republishing it on their own site. This has long been a game of Adsense plays where people create these “auto blogs” that just feed scraped content into their site and try to make some Adsense revenue off them. The concept is to get 1000 sites that make you $10 or $15 a month, etc… To a large extent this tactic doesn’t work very well for a lot of reasons and it’s getting harder and harder since these algorithm changes.

There is another trend that we have seen personally on some Adsense sites that we have as well as elsewhere in the industry that is being observed where even though traffic has not necessary diminished Adsense revenue has. Though this is pure speculation on our part, we’re of the belief that they have likely tweaked the Adsense payouts with a “quality factor” that they apply to the site similar to the quality factor that Adwords uses.

Duplicate content will always exist on the Internet and there’s nothing wrong with it (what is a press release, for example, if not 100% duplicate content). The problem that they were trying to combat was it was getting too easy to game the system. People had scraper sites with crappy content that were outranking the original content they scraped!

Our advice is this. If you use EzineArticles or other article directories as part of your distribution channel, that’s fine. But don’t publish anything to them that comes from your site. Keep the two completely discreet from a content perspective. Put unique content on your site and use other content for SEO submissions. Many people do the following. They order an article and publish it on their site. Then later they spin it and republish it on a bunch of article directories, etc… It is our recommendation that you not follow that tact any longer. Keep your content unique and the SEO fodder separate – it’s just smart.

-Troy

On March 8, 2011 Jayson wrote:

Hi Troy,

Thanks for the detailed response. Since the algorithm update I’ve seen internet marketers everywhere giving the same advice: “Don’t syndicate the exact same content that’s on your Website.” However I haven’t yet seen a good reason why not to.

Obviously, there are huge costs involved with writing new content for SEO fodder, so if it’s OK to distribute your content completely unchanged as it appears on your Website, you can save a lot of money and arguably realize the same benefits.

My question is, why not syndicate your Website’s content? Of course, it’s important to make sure that Google has indexed your content on your own domain first. But, assuming that’s done, what can be the problem? I decided to do some investigation and ended up writing a 4000+ word blog post at my Website that examines all the evidence and data I can come up with. The post includes verbiage straight from Google regarding syndication.

I know you’re busy guys, but if you can make some time to read my post I think you’ll see that I have researched this topic pretty thoroughly, and nowhere have I found any evidence to back up what seems to be a widely perpetuated fallacy.

I am actually doing a giant test of my own; I just launched a Website with over 100 pages of completely fresh, unique, quality content, and I am in the process of syndicating that content as far and wide as I possibly can.

On March 10, 2011 Troy wrote:

Hi Jayson,

Nice post by the way (your blog post I mean). You put a lot of effort and research into that. So, without writing a 4000 word response, here’s my answer in a two paragraphs or less…

Basically you answered your own question in your post on your blog. Can you do it? Sure. Should you? I don’t think so. Here’s the thing, it really depends upon the site you are promoting. If it’s just a test site or an affiliate site that you’re still tinkering with to determine if you’re going to pursue it more aggressively, etc… then sure if it’ll save you a few bucks and you can’t afford to do it otherwise, sure, go ahead. But, our advice here is more geared towards small business owners and people making their full time income off of their site and my advice stands – protect your money site and protect your content. As your own research pointed out, syndicating the content from your site can facilitate other higher authority sites actually out ranking you with your own content. Personally that’s just not a risk we’re willing to take nor one we would advise readers to take.

Anyway, thanks for your very well thought out response and in-depth research… might make sense for you going after 50 sites, but ask yourself this. If you had just one site making $5k a month and depended on that sites income to feed the family and put the kids through college, which way would you go? I can assure you we don’t syndicate our content here or even spin it and syndicate it. We keep our site content unique and write separate SEO content and for *most* people that probably makes the best sense as well. The risks of devaluing your site’s authority and rankings simply outweigh the potential rewards of some cheaper links.

Take care,

Troy

1) I am about to launch a massive Website which I hope to monetize quickly, but I need to know if it’ll be a good idea to syndicate the content from the site as a viable method for obtaining direct referral traffic and backlinks without compromising its organic search traffic (more on this later).

2) I searched for two hours last night and couldn’t find a definitive conclusion to this question.

In this blog post, I’m going to address everything you want and/or need to know about duplicate content. This is partially for my own personal future reference as I will undoubtedly face this question again in the future, but also to share with you the fruits of hours upon hours of research, testing, and analysis that I’ve been working on. After all, sharing makes everything more fun, right? OK, take a deep breath. Here goes.

Duplicate content: What is it?

Here’s Google’s own definition of duplicate content:

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.

So basically, there are two types of duplicate content:

• Duplicate content within the same domain
• Duplicate content across different domains

First, let’s cover duplicate content within the same domain.

Q: Is there a duplicate content penalty?

Ever since I started getting my feet wet in SEO, this question has swirled around forums and blogs. Somewhere, someone out there perpetuated the idea that having the same content on page A of your Website as page B of your Website would cause your site to be penalized in search engine rankings. This idea began to percolate in the internet marketing community because a bunch of spammers realized that when they had a piece of content (ie, an article) that was getting a lot of search traffic, they could fill up every page of their Website with the same content in order to pull even more traffic from the search engines. Obviously, the same article blatantly duplicated across hundreds of pages within a single domain is a malicious attempt to gain search engine traffic without actually adding any value. Google caught on pretty quickly to this method and fixed its algorithms to detect duplicate content and display only one version of it in the search rankings. Websites that engaged in this blatant activity were de-indexed and cried up a river across forums and blogs throughout the internet marketing community. Thus was born the fear of the “duplicate content penalty.”

However, in the vast majority of cases, duplicate content is non-malicious and simply a product of whichever CMS (content management system) the Website happens to be running on. For example, WordPress (the industry-standard CMS) automatically creates “Category” and “tag” pages which list all blog posts within certain categories or tags. This creates multiple URLs within the domain that contain the same content. For example, this particular post will be on the root domain (www.jaysondemers.com, while it remains on the first page), the “single post” version (which you can find by clicking the title of the blog), and in the “Categories” and “Tags” pages. So that means this particular post will be duplicated 4 times on this domain. But am I doing that intentionally in order to get more search engine traffic? No! It’s simply a product of the automatic, behind-the-scenes work that my CMS (WordPress) is doing.

Google knows this, and they are not going to penalize me for it. Millions of Websites are running on WordPress and have the exact same thing happening. But what if I were to take this particular post and re-post it 100 times in a row on my blog? That would definitely send red flags when Google’s crawler sees it, and one of two things will happen at that point.

1) Google may decide to let me off with a “warning” and simply choose not to index 99 of my 100 duplicate posts, but keep one of them indexed. NOTE: This doesn’t mean my Website’s search rankings would be affected in any way.

2) Google may decide it’s such a blatant attempt at gaming the system that it completely de-indexes my entire Website from all search results. This means that, even if you searched directly for “jaysondemers.com” Google would find no results.

So, one of those two scenarios is guaranteed to happen. Which one it is depends on how egregious Google determines your blunder to be. In Google’s own words:

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

This type of non-malicious duplication is fairly common, especially since many CMSs don’t handle this well by default. So when people say that having this type of duplicate content can affect your site, it’s not because you’re likely to be penalized; it’s simply due to the way that web sites and search engines work.

Most search engines strive for a certain level of variety; they want to show you ten different results on a search results page, not ten different URLs that all have the same content. To this end, Google tries to filter out duplicate documents so that users experience less redundancy.

So, what happens when a search engine crawler detects duplicate content? (from http://searchengineland.com/search-illustrated-how-a-search-engine-determines-duplicate-content-13980)

The final word: Duplicate content on the same domain

The final word is that, unless you are really blatantly duplicating your content across tons of URLs within the same domain, there’s nothing to worry about. One of your URLs on which the duplicated content resides will be indexed and chosen as the “representative” of that URL cluster. When users perform search queries in the search engines, that particular piece of content will display as a result for relevant queries, and the other URLs in the dupe cluster will not. Simple as that.

However, the other side of the coin is duplicate content across different domains. And that’s a whole different monster. Ready to tackle it? Here we go.

Duplicate content across domains: What is it?

Sometimes, the same piece of content can appear word-for-word across different URLs. Some examples of this include:

• News articles (think Associated Press)
• The same article from an article directory being picked up by different Webmasters
• Webmasters submitting the same content to different article directories
• Press releases being distributed across the Web
• Product information from a manufacturer appearing across different e-commerce Websites

All these examples result from content syndication. The Web is full of syndicated content. One press release can create duplicate content across thousands of unique domains. But search engines strive to deliver a good user experience to searchers, and delivering a results page consisting of the same pieces of content would not make very many people happy. So what is a search engine supposed to do? Somehow, it has to decide which location of the content is the most relevant to show the searcher. So how does it do that? Straight from the big G:

When encountering such duplicate content on different sites, we look at various signals to determine which site is the original one, which usually works very well. This also means that you shouldn’t be very concerned about seeing negative effects on your site’s presence on Google if you notice someone scraping your content.

Well, Google, I beg to differ. Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re very good at deciding which site is the originator of the content. Neither does Michael Gray, who laments in his blog post “When Google Gets Duplicate Content Wrong” that Google often attributes his original content to other sites to which he syndicates his content. According to Michael:

However the problem is with Google, their ranking algo IMHO places too much of a bias on domain trust and authority.

And I agree with Michael. For much of my internet marketing career I have syndicated full articles to various article directories in order to expand the reach of my content while also using it as “SEO fuel” to get backlinks to my Websites. According to Google, as long as your syndicated versions contain a backlink to your original, this will help your case when Google decides which piece is the original. Here’s proof:

First, a video featuring Matt Cutts, a well-known blogger and search engine algorithm engineer for Google:

The discussion on syndication starts at about 2:25. At 2:54 he says you can tell people that you’re the “master of the content” by including a link from the syndicated piece back to your original piece.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niINTKXT-zs]

More evidence:

In cases when you are syndicating your content but also want to make sure your site is identified as the original source, it’s useful to ask your syndication partners to include a link back to your original content.

And finally:

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

Now, what I think is interesting from this last quote from Google is that they actually admit that the piece of content they choose may not be the right one. In my experience, it’s very likely not to pick the right one if the site that originated the content is relatively young or has a low PageRank. So this raises the next big issue:

How do I get ranked as the original source for the content I syndicate?

I’ve syndicated tons of my articles to EzineArticles only to see Google credit them with higher search results for my content, even when I made fully sure that Google had indexed my content at its original location prior to submitting it to Ezine. Vanessa Fox, who previously worked at Google and built Webmaster Central, attempts to tackle this question in her blog post, “Ranking as the Original Source for the Content you Syndicate.”

Unfortunately, she concludes that, basically, there’s nothing you can do to ensure that you do. She suggests:

Create a different version of the content to syndicate than what you write for your own site. This method works best for things like product affiliate feeds. I don’t think it works as well for things like blog posts or other types of articles. Instead, you could do something like write a high level summary article for syndication and a blog post with details about that topic for your own site.

Rewriting a piece of content is not my definition of syndication. That’s just rewriting an article in different words and distributing it. Almost all information circulating on the Web has already been posted elsewhere anyway; even this blog post is composed of a ton of information that I found elsewhere on the internet. So to me, writing a new article that says the same thing in different words and distributing that to syndication partners isn’t really syndication of the original article. It’s syndication of a different article. So we’re still left with the question of the results of syndicating the exact same content that already appears on your Website: what are the effects of doing so? Can it harm my rankings in any way?

To me, this is the most important question surrounding duplicate content. Before I jump into that analysis, let’s consider an important foundational question.

Why would I want to syndicate the exact same content from my Website elsewhere?

The internet really operates on a simple economy of give-and-take. The two commodities that are exchanged are unique content and backlinks. Unique Content is defined as content which Google does not identify as duplicate. There are various theories about where exactly Google draws the line of deciding whether content should be considered duplicate, but one figure I’ve heard tossed around a lot is 30%. Basically, according to the 30% theory, if Google identifies that more than 30% of a particular piece of content appears elsewhere across the internet, it’ll be categorized as duplicate. Now, I can’t attest to the accuracy of this figure, so take it for what it’s worth. There’s also various duplicate content-detection software such as CopyScape which is designed to help Webmasters check to see if their content has been stolen and duplicated across other domains. This is also a good tool to use to determine whether your content is likely to be considered duplicate by Google. And that’s what really matters.

But I’ve gotten a bit off track, let’s get back to the discussion of why you’d want to syndicate content. I mentioned the internet economy of backlinks and unique content. Unique content is desirable because it will be indexed by Google, giving that particular Website another instance of its “name in the hat” so to speak. Basically, the more content a Website has indexed, the more chances it has of being returned in Google’s search results for relevant queries.

But what about backlinks? Backlinks are simply links from any other Website to your own. Search engines consider it a “vote” when one Website links to another. This vote is used to determine authority & relevance in Google’s search results. In fact, it’s thought that backlinks are the single most-important factor in determining how your Website should rank for a given query. There are a ton of factors that play into backlinks and how much their “vote” counts for, but I’ll get into that in a future blog post. For now, what you need to know is that backlinks are valuable because they improve your rankings in the search engines, and that means more traffic to your Website.

OK, so now we’ve covered the basic commodities of the micro-economy of the Web. This is important because when you syndicate your content, assuming you have included a backlink in it linking back to your original source, you get a backlink from each and every Website to which your content was syndicated. Awesome, right?

Maybe not. The first question is how highly Google values a backlink from a piece of content that is known to be duplicate content. Frankly, I don’t know. On the one hand, it’s easy to syndicate content to a bunch of auto-accept blogs if your sole goal is to get backlinks, and this says nothing about the quality of your content or how much the originator of the content should be rewarded. On the other hand, syndication can also be a great indicator of the quality of a particular piece of content. After all, why would it be syndicated so much if it weren’t really great?

In the end, Google probably has signals for how it answers these two questions, but the real answers are probably only known by the software engineers that coded the algorithm. Many folks try to boost the value of their syndicated content by engaging in content “spinning” which is perfectly legitimate as long as it’s not the garbage that’s often spouted out by automated software. I’ll go into more depth about content spinning in a later post. For now, we’re still trying to answer the question of whether syndicating content exactly as it appears on your own Website is a good idea or a bad idea. After careful testing I’ve come to the following conclusion:

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Maybe.

I know, I know. That’s not the answer you wanted. Allow me to explain.

I own over 50 domains, and I like to do a lot of testing across them. I spent a couple hours last night performing searches for my content that I had syndicated to various other blogs and directories. And what I found was both disappointing and encouraging.

The disappointing part was that, in many cases, my syndicated content outranked my own original content. Even if a site ranked higher than mine for my own content had a backlink to my site, the originator of the content, it was like Google completely ignored that backlink and still gave more credit to the other sites. In some cases, my own site’s version of the content was nowhere to be found, obviously falling into Google’s duplicate URL cluster and being filtered out of the search results. This means that by syndicating my content, I actually, in effect, got my own content de-indexed.

This is pretty much the worst possible scenario, but it happened. Sometimes, at least. And that’s the weird part; sometimes, my content was recognized as the original content and received the highest ranking. With other sites and pieces of content, it ranked second behind a high-authority site, usually EzineArticles. So I have to conclude the following:

When you syndicate your content, it might:

• Cause your own, original content source (ie, your Website) to be, in effect, de-indexed for that piece of content
• Cause your site to rank highly for queries relevant to your content, but not highest
• Cause your site to rank highest for your content

Well, that pretty much covers all the bases, doesn’t it? These are all the results I observed when looking at my own sites and the results of syndicating articles that originated on those sites. Basically, I can conclude that Google just doesn’t always get it right. And, Google doesn’t like to do anything with any sort of consistency. The last thing they want is for us SEOs to completely figure out their algorithm, because once that happens, the integrity of their search results will be destroyed as folks manipulate them all to hell.

The encouraging part was when I discovered that the backlinks from the syndicated content definitely helped my sites’ rankings for my target keywords. So there is definitely at least some value of backlinks originating from content which Google has labeled as “duplicate.”

So, the final question remains: Should I syndicate my content?

Let’s look at the benefits of doing so:

Benefits of syndicating your content:

• Get backlinks from lots of sites
• Expand your reach and brand awareness to highly-trafficked sites
• Get direct traffic via referrals from backlinks in your syndicated content
• Much cheaper way of getting backlinks than writing brand-new content (or re-writing existing content) for distribution/syndication

Drawbacks of syndicating your content:

• The sites to which you syndicate might actually outrank you for your own content if they have higher authority than your own site, even if you follow Google’s advice and include a backlink to the original source of the content
• Google might group the URL on which your content resides with the rest of the duplicates, hiding it from search engine results pages (effectively de-indexing it)

So, in the end, syndicating your content is risky. You can definitely get the best of both worlds if Google decides your site is the originator of the content, thereby rewarding your content with the top position in the search results and also getting all the juicy backlinks that play into your overall rankings for specific keywords. But if Google gets it wrong (and it does, quite often, contrary to what they might think), you risk having your content never rank for relevant search engine queries.

And this really worries me, because I’ve always held the opinion that there’s nothing else someone else can do to harm the rankings of a particular Website. After analyzing these results, I fear I’ve found a loophole in my own argument; If someone else visits my Website, copies all my content and syndicates it around the Web, it’s possible that the sites to which my content was syndicated will actually rank higher for it than my own site. Google tries to address this problem here as well as in the Matt Cutts video:

In most cases a webmaster has no influence on third parties that scrape and redistribute content without the webmaster’s consent. We realize that this is not the fault of the affected webmaster, which in turn means that identical content showing up on several sites in itself is not inherently regarded as a violation of our webmaster guidelines. This simply leads to further processes with the intent of determining the original source of the content—something Google is quite good at, as in most cases the original content can be correctly identified, resulting in no negative effects for the site that originated the content.

Again, unfortunately I have to point out that in my own experience, repeatedly, I’ve seen my own content rank worse than the sites to which it was syndicated. So even though Google thinks it’s good at identifying the original source of the content, my data suggest otherwise. In time, we can only hope that Google improves this aspect of its algorithm; there’s certainly nothing more we can do as Webmasters. Instead, you just have to understand the benefits and drawbacks of syndication and decide whether you’re comfortable with taking on the risks of having Google wrongly identify ownership of your content.

Here are a couple tips to minimize the risk of Google getting it wrong (in theory):

• Always post new content to your own Website and then wait to syndicate it elsewhere until Google has crawled and indexed your content. You can check to see if a particular page has been indexed by performing a search query of your exact URL, in quotes. If the search returns the correct result (ie, not zero results) then it has been indexed. Another neat trick you can try is to randomly select 11-12 words from your content and search for that string, again in quotes. You wouldn’t think it, but the likelihood that any 10-12 words in a specific sequence will appear elsewhere on the Web is extremely small. Try it now — copy and paste a random sentence from this paragraph into Google, surround it in quotes, and see how many results you get. You will probably only find this URL as a result, unless this article has been syndicated (this is also a great way to check out which sites have picked up your content when you syndicate it).
• Always include a backlink in your syndicated version to the original content source URL. Google says this is the way to do it right, but it’s still not a surefire thing. Nonetheless, it certainly can’t hurt.

What about taking Vanessa’s suggestion and re-writing your content before syndicating it?

This would definitely solve the problem of possibly getting your own content essentially de-indexed when Google wrongly attributes content ownership, but there are some major problems with it too:

• It’s really expensive if you have a lot of content. Think about how much time it would take you to rewrite each article you have. This post alone is over 4,000 words and took me 3+ hours to type! You could outsource the rewriting to a service like Human Rewriter but that will cost you around $4 per 500 words. That could get very expensive if you have a lot of content.
• You are still distributing content that is topically themed around the same keywords as your original content, so it’s not a stretch to think that the rewritten content would still outrank your original content for relevant search queries, especially on high-authority sites such as EzineArticles.

In the end, it all comes down to testing on a massive scale, getting solid data and making decisions based on that data. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to run a huge test and then update this post with my results. At the beginning of the post I mentioned that I am soon launching a massive Website with tons of unique content. I’m going to syndicate it all, completely unedited, as far and wide as I possibly can. As I do so, I’ll monitor traffic sources to see what keywords people are using to find my content. Then, I’ll replicate those keyword queries in Google and see where my site ranks in the search results. This should be the definitive test for the merits of syndication.

Thanks for sticking with me through this post! Check back soon for updates.

Further reading on duplicate content:

Google Webmaster Central

Demystifying the Duplicate Content Penalty

Duplicate content due to scrapers

Ranking as the original source for content you syndicate

When Google gets duplicate content wrong

How a search engine determines duplicate content

So, here’s what happens when the search engine finds your article:

1. It reads the article

2. It determines “keyword density” of each word or phrase in the article. This means that it looks at the entire number of words in the article and finds how many times particular words or phrases are repeated in the article. Words and phrases that are repeated more often have higher keyword density. This is how the search engine knows what your article is about. So for an article about “desktop PC cases,” that phrase might appear 4 times in your 700-word article. That would give it a density of about 1.7%. (12/700 = 1.7%). We use 12 because “desktop PC cases” is comprised of 3 words, so 3 words X 4 appearances = 12. You can help the search engine figure out what your article is about by including the keyword in the title, first paragraph, and last paragraph of your article, as the search engines know to put extra emphasis on these areas of the article.

3. It picks out the words and phrases with the highest keyword density and uses those to determine what the article is about (in essence, the article is assigned a “relevancy score”). So for our “desktop PC cases” example, if it finds a high keyword density of “desktop PC cases” then it knows to expect high densities of other related terms (LSI terms), like: ATX, cooling, power supply, motherboard, gaming case, custom case, etc… The search engines know what related terms to expect for any given keyword; they have gotten pretty smart. So if they expect to see certain related keywords in the article but they don’t find those keywords, they assign it a lower relevancy score. This directly impacts where that article will rank in the search engines when someone searches for your target keyword.

LSI is a very key concept in SEO (search engine optimization). Search engine algorithms are always improving, and right now they are rewarding content that has a good balance of LSI terms with the main keyword of the article. So if your plan is to use the content that you write to build a Website, optimize that Website for SEO, and monetize the traffic that comes to the Website, it’s important that your articles have a good mix of LSI terms. So when I read articles, I read them from two different perspectives:

1. Human (Does it read well?)
2. SEO Specialist/search engine spider (Is there a good keyword density? Are there lots of LSI terms?)

So for future article marketing efforts, try to incorporate LSI terms. Just think about what terms are unique to the niche you’re writing for. Often, these terms will occur organically as you write. But for best results, you should be conscious of how the search engine spiders are going to read your content.

Take this blog post, for example. The main topic of this post is LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing), but I’ve sprinkled a bunch of LSI terms into this post:

- SEO
- content
- relevant
- keyword
- keyword density
- search engine
- search engine optimization
- Website
- article marketing
- rank
- monetize

All these terms are related to LSI and the broader category of SEO, which the search engines will recognize when their spiders crawl this post. And the result? This blog post will be assigned a higher relevancy score for those categories. And that means it’ll rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Simple as that.

Now, don’t get me wrong; LSI isn’t the only determining factor of how your content ranks in the SERPs. In fact, it’s only one of hundreds, if not thousands of factors. That said, it’s gaining importance in the search engine algorithms so it’s worth thinking about when you are writing SEO-optimized content.

So, what is the #1 ranking factor?

Backlinks. In an upcoming blog post I’ll discuss exactly what backlinks are, how they play into the ranking algorithm, and how you can use this information to get your Website ranked where you want it to be.