[thelist] While We Are on the Topic of SEO

Asif Suria asifsuria at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 20 03:03:42 CDT 2006


I figured I would throw in a SEO question as well. So
here goes, "Is the duplicate content penalty a myth or
a fact?"

The reason I ask? I launched a website called
SINLetter.com in October 2005 and after a few fleeting
moments in the sun, I was banished into the Google
sandbox, emerged for a little while and was Google
bowled short thereafter. I blogged about this here
http://www.sinletter.com/blogComment.aspx?id=16

This was not very worrying as I still kept getting
traffic from google for other non-competitive search
terms like "Chipotle investment" and "wipro split".
All this time I had a high ranking on both MSN and
Yahoo search. I even started ranking number 1 for the
highly competitive search term "investment newsletter"
on MSN search (I wonder for how much longer) and
number 3 on Yahoo search. 

However about two weeks ago, my website fell off the
face of this earth (er, Google search results). Even
non-competitive terms like "tata motors investment" or
"chipotle investment" would no longer bring up my
website on Google. The only traffic I would get from
Google was from people actually searching for
SINLetter or some other obscure search term.  

The only change that I know of that occurred around
that time was that two financial websites started
carrying my content. I asked one of them to stop
carrying my content and it seems to be helping a
little. However the webmaster of that website tried
telling me that the duplicate content penalty was a
myth and pointed to the case of Reuters and the
Associated Press often using the same content.

I would be very interested in hearing from folks on
this list who have any experience with this or have
any knowledge about the duplicate content penalty. And
just in case someone from Google is on this list,
please take me out of the google sandbox, google
bowling punishment rink and the duplicate content
penalty box. Legitimate websites that have not
participated in black hat SEO techniques do not
deserve such a harsh sentence.  

Asif

--- Ian Anderson <ian at zstudio.co.uk> wrote:

> M. Seyon wrote:
> 
> > Dare I ask what cricket's seo class is and on what
> basis is it a class 
> > worth taking (besides being free)?
> 
> I have been on her classes lurking for a while -
> very good content, very 
> rigid structure. She runs one class at a time for
> about a month, sending 
> out emails, which are then discussed via email.
> 
> High traffic mail list.
> 
> Nice woman - you need to sign up for two different
> classes concurrently 
> which means more mail you'll never read than you've
> ever seen in your 
> life, but it's free. I think it is worth doing if
> you are genuinely in 
> need of developing better SEO skills.
> 
> All white-hat.
> 
> HTH
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Ian
> 
> -- 
> zStudio - Web development and accessibility
> - http://zStudio.co.uk
> Snippetz.net - Your personal, private code library
> - http://snippetz.net
> 
> -- 
> 
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