Jianjun’s Blog

Most SEO experts tell us that identical (duplicate) content will negatively affect our website’s search engine ranking and may even result in our websites being penalized. Well, to some extent, this may be true, as we do hear people say their websites are being banned or even dropped from search index. But according to my recent observation, those are probably just some very rare cases.

Some of the most notorious copycat websites almost don’t have any original content. They simply search on the Internet and found those keyword-rich articles and heap them together to make a gigantic website. They do things that Google ‘threatens’ to punish but they do get very good SEO results!

Their tactic is very simple. The site owner sets up a large number of blogs on free platforms with the same duplicate content linking to one another with most links back to the main site, while the main site doesn’t link back to these satellites. At the same time, they submit all those blogs to search engines and services such as Technorati to get better exposure and higher authority.

Let’s look at a live example: ‘translation183.bloglipi.com‘. The blog not only uses duplicate contents from other websites, but also has unknown number of embedded keyword-rich links to its main site - sytra.cn.

On Technorati, there are 19 blog reactions to it (see http://www.technorati.com/search/translation183.bloglipi.com) and one of those reacted back has an authority of 58 (see http://www.technorati.com/blogs/jonramos.com/wpmu/translation182). Needless to say, all those ‘reactions’ are created by the same guy and those blog names mostly have a ‘translaiton183′, ‘translation182′ or something similar.

I guess no SEO experts will actually recommend such a strategy to generate traffic, but it works. In just a few months time, Sytra.cn generated a very good traffic of more than 6,000 unique visits per month and a Google pagerank of 3.

Please don’t take me wrong. I’m with you in condemning such copycats + spammers and I believe what they are building right now will in the end be their tombs (something a Semantic Web will do well).

The purpose of this article is to show you search engine algorithms of today are far from perfect in dealing with such abusive acts and, at the same time, some unintentional duplicate content or a little too many links probably won’t do us much harm in regard to SEO.

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