Anybody want to guess what this chart represents? There is a bit of a clue in the title. Give up?…. That chart shows organic traffic for a new website built almost entirely from freely available articles. It is the laziest type of content and according to every SEO expert out there should not be getting organic search traffic.
What you are looking at in that graph is a simple WordPress blog that has slowly been populated by articles based* on content from the various free article sources spread around the net. After about a week (using nothing more than simple sitemap submission) pages started to appear in Google’s index. From that point you can see how the traffic grows with just about each daily post – all this traffic is coming from Google’s SERPS. Sweet.
Then something strange happens, I stop posting (copy and paste is sooo boring) and the traffic starts to dry up. After a few days with no posting we now have a website that has no pages in Google’s index. This could be for a number of reasons
1. I stopped posting
2. I haven’t bothered to build back links
3. It gets penalized for being duplicate content
Now this where it gets fun. I’ve already proven that it is possible to get traffic by using free articles but it seems to only have a short life span. Anybody care to guess what happens when I start posting again and actually take a little bit of time to build some links into that website? I have my suspicions but part 2 of this article will show if you really can rank duplicate content in the long term.
*Article content was straight from the article directories, obviously the page layout/menus/other page text made each page unique.
11 Responses to “Yes, You Can Rank Duplicate Content – Part 1”
Chris
April 3, 2009
I think, as far as google cares, there are two types of duplicate content.
Syndicated [such as news stories] that are bound to be duplicated, and plagurised content.
In either case google defines the original as the first one it sees, or by the one with the best backlink profile. You see it assumes that the original, and subsequently best article, will have most of the links.
Alternatively you could always run the content through a synonimizer
P
|Paul B
April 3, 2009
Yep, I was thinking of spinning some of the articles but my initial aim was to see just how clever the duplicate filter is. Initial results were very good (for lazy people), I’m just chucking a few links into the mix.
I love these sorts of experiments, testing the boundaries of what’s just www rumour and what’s fact. By the way – Yahoo loves my duplicate content
|Chris
April 3, 2009
You thrown any adsense on?
|It’d be cool to see how much you can make off it in this little experiment
Paul B
April 6, 2009
I did for a day or 2 then took it down. Want to stay under the radar until I can get the traffic where I want it
|Jesse
April 10, 2009
I’m also interested in seeing the results of your little experiment. I don’t have a problem with using freely available articles for this practice, its just when people use others “not freely available” content and do this that gets me riled up. Google seems to determine what site is the “copier” based upon each sites age, pagerank and other “googlitics” which will often times punish the wrong site if the offending site has more “pull”
I’ve had it happen to me on a few of my sites when others frame my (and others) content on their site.. So, i put a script on my sites now that will break out from their wanna be frame so all is well.. it’s stuff like this that really miffs me
Jesse’s last blog post..Twitter spoofs run rampant online
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