Duplicate Content is now a Penalty – According to Google

For years, there has been debates about people using “duplicate content” on the web. And for the most part, the only way Google in the past would penalize you is if you posted the exact same content in the same place, trying to game Google and getting more link juice.

Most people understand, 1) it would be stupid to do that, especially for a customer or end user to read the same post over and over on a blog or website and 2) that Google would penalize you for this.

But, if I posted an article entitled “How to Get High on The Search Engines” on my blog, and then posted it on 5 other blogs, that was acceptable to Google.

UNTIL YESTERDAY – Now, the Rules have Changed!

There is a concept called, “scraping” where you have software scrape content (steal) from other sites, and autopost to a different site.

Some of these scraped sites only exist to get traffic and have people click on the ads on the site to make money. In some ways, that’s not a bad thing, as long as the articles bring value and the person clicking on the ads finds what they were trying to find in the first place right?

Not any more people, and you need to pay attention to this immediately, as a bunch of websites are about to get slapped and people who build their businesses on this sole revenue model are about to see it all go *POOF right in front of their eyes.

Google has now changed their algorithm to prevent webspam from showing up in the search engine!

The root of the problem may be content farm websites, that aggregate stories from the web. These aggragators are out ranking the main websites that they took content from, and this is aggravating the people who are posting legitimate, original content.

Autoblogs are now being built to suck up content from any blog, using any keyword, hoping it will bring a visitor and lead to a click, optin, or adsense click.

Read some of the updates that Matt Cutts, from Google’s Web Spam team has to say on the topic on the Google blog.

Matt says, “Just as a reminder, webspam is junk you see in search results when websites try to cheat their way into higher positions in search results or otherwise violate search engine quality guidelines.”

Matt goes on to say, “To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments.”

So Google is getting smarter and smarter and spammers are going to try a way to keep “gaming Google” to keep those checks coming, I can guarantee it.

What will happen even more, because it is already happening is that “spinners” that rotate words inside texts are going to begin spinning people’s original content work and posting on their “SPLOGs” (spam blogs), trying to pass it off as new. And this is certain to anger those who advocate fair linking and credit when people post or use their articles or media content online.

Now, here is the death blow which is gonna make the term duplicate content penalty really have a new meaning from now on…

“And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” said Cutts.

It has been confirmed, it’s gonna ripple through the net any day now, and people are gonna start to see rankings drop and incomes disappear. You can see Matt’s comment from his own blog that the death slap is coming and already released.

Maybe that’s a good thing for people who want a cleaned up and accurate search result, but it’s bad news for spammy internet marketers for sure.

How this plays out in your business model is yet to be seen. And like I said, spammers and scrapers will find a way to spin original conent into “original content” using complex text spinners, and these may slip through, but the days of ranking high on Google at least with an autoblog are about to be over.

What do you think?

Matt Cutts, concluded: “The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”

Now, what does this mean for article directories? They all have the same content in them, right? What about bloggers who post their original content into their blogs first, and then push those articles out to the article networks… will there now be a penalty?

Will the article site outrank the blog site?

Will Google only show the Blog site now, but no articles sites in the search results pages?

How will Google be able to know what the original content was and the scraped content?

Maybe a solution is to scrape a little and blog for real a little with original content? Therefore Google wont see the site an entirely a content spam collection farm?

Here is a video from Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.com and what he found his best solution to be to combat search engine spam.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about the topic…