Author: Nancy McCord

I read this article at SiteProNews with interest “Duplicate Content — It’s Time to Shatter the Myths” by Martin O’Neill. In the article the author states:

“..feel free to use content from online sources but your long-term goal should be producing quality, original content and material that will serve your website and online presence in the months and years to come.”

You’ll want to read the full article yourself to understand the full breadth of the topic. I however, with all due respect, disagree with the conclusions drawn by the author about duplicate content and rankings for sites that use it on Google.

Case in point – just ask the owners of e-commerce stores whose product descriptions are shared by a large number of similar websites what has happened to their website placement. Most sites have been penalized; pushed so far back in the organic results that they now have to move into Google AdWords in order to have their websites found. Don’t take it from me, listen to what Matt Cutts, Google’s lead Web Spam engineer says about duplicate content in this video.

The takeaway is that duplicate content is a placement factor and especially if you do not provide additional value or a unique point of view. You’d just have to sit in my office for a week to know that duplicate content is a huge problem for website owners and that many are struggling to regain placement that they have lost.

The author of the article gives an example of a small limited test he did with two websites he launched with the same content and that Google placed both in four weeks. I want to point out that this is a very limited test and that he reviewed placement in four weeks only. We’ve found that after launch a site will be boosted in organic placement and then after six weeks or so the placement will significantly drop to where it will typically stay in the SERPs. Small overlaps of content may not be a huge impact as shown in his own test, but one should not derive that duplicate content is not penalized by his limited review.

What I have found is that when you scrape a site, use article marketing sites to build your content from (where others pull and use these articles as well), use content that is widely duplicated by others (vendor descriptions), you will need to make sure to have a nice sized AdWords budget as you will simply not be able to place organically on Google using these types of tactics.

Google hates keyword stuffing and clearly addressed this SEO tactic in the Panda update last year. In fact, Google actually states this in their webmaster guidelines about keyword stuffing:

 “Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

Examples of keyword stuffing include:

• Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value
• Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for
• Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural, for example:
  We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at custom.cigar.humidors@example.com.”

Here are some sites online that are using keyword stuffing so you can take a real world look at this technique in action:

http://www.ranchland.com/
Take a look at the footer to see the stuffing in action? But although this site is clearly in violation of Google’s rules, it is still getting top placement on important industry specific keywords. Take a look at the content and you’ll see that it is in some places nearly unreadable for keywords interspersed in the content. So why has this site not been penalized? There simply may be more at play than we know that is keeping this site in the top spot.

 

http://www.bowcolabs.com/
Here’s another site that is using the tactic that Google has clearly disavowed at the bottom of the page just as an example. Although this site does not have top 60 result placement, it is a fine example of what to steer clear of in regards to keyword stuffing.

So back to the topic, if Google hates keyword stuffing, why are top sites still using it and why have they not dropped in placement? Although these sites may have slipped through Google’s filter, there may be other factors at play that are keeping top sites using stuffing still at the top. Or it may also be that Google simply has not caught up with sites using these tactics. Whatever the reason, for sites that are using this stuffing, I would recommend a slow revision to remove it while improving content and user engagement.

I personally don’t believe that using just these disavowed techniques will get any site top placement. What gets placement is a combination of quality content, some degree of keyword density (1% to 2%), quality inbound links, and shareable content.