November 28th, 2008 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

Google, can’t live with them, most of us wouldn’t survive without them! You’d think with all that’s been written about Google that they are the tough task masters of a private members club that sees junior members whipped and punished for the slightest indiscretion. Are they really that bad though? In reality all you need to keep Google happy is some decent content and a number of relevant links. That’s all you need!

There are some people out there though that find this all too much. They try to game Google. Unless they are cleverer than the average bear they also end up with a penalty. As Google weigh heavily on links it is this that most people try to game, so if they do get a penalty it’s most likely link related. Black hat, shady, paid linking is where you’ll most likely get your page punished.

There are however other search engines that aren’t as strict as Google. They thrive on the dodgy links that Google will penalise you for. It’s this difference between the various search engines that we can use to our advantage. Google penalise a page, to be more specific a URL. That page contains content, content that isn’t ranking in Google. Google’s duplicate content filter only shows the the same content once, well that’s the theory anyway. What we could do is to take the content from the page that has been penalised (for shady linking) and put it onto our own page. It’s a very easy source of new content.

The only difficulty here is finding pages that have been handed a smack down by Google. Well with MS Live search we have an easy way of finding some. Live search ranks crap, Google doesn’t. Do a search in Live for your chosen topic. Now make a note of the top 2-3 pages worth of results. We now need to check Google to see if those same pages (that no doubt have plenty of spammy links, that’s what MSN search feeds on) appear anywhere in Google. Of course there are different ranking algorithms at play here but if you can’t find a page in the top 10 pages of Google but it’s near the top in MSN then there’s a fairly good bet that it’s been penalised. “Borrow”, change (to whatever degree you want) and post. As I said it is a simple way of finding content that you can rank in Google. You’re probably worried about Google’s duplicate content filter at this point. But in my experience the filter is just that a filter, not a penalty. If your content is on a page with a better “non penalised” profile then you stand a good chance of becoming the chosen one.

So there you have it, a lazy way of finding content. (Next time I’ll go over how to use the noindex meta instruction to our advantage!)

Disclaimer – Use this at your own risk. In my opinion there is nothing better than original informative content and using this type of “content source” is a lazy short cut. The trouble is that whilst other people are doing the same and the search engines are not picking up on it then it’s fair game.

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Paul B