Content Duplication?

I don't know what you mean about copyscape (oh, okay, had to look it up - it's a bit more complicated than that but it's a good way to find out about any sites that are scraping you). You'll never be able to completely prevent people from scraping your content, especially if you're publishing an RSS feed. As the article referenced below points out, you just need to be more important than the others.

Search engines, particulalry Google, don't like duplicate content. When they find mutiple pages that appear to be the same they'll just pick one to display and dump all the other ones. Here's a reference:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-illustrated-guide-to-duplicate-content-in-the-search-engines

And here's Matt Cutts on link exchanges:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-hell/

Google frowns on any unnatural link. Whether you bought it, traded for it, put it there yourself, whatever. If it's not editorially given based on merit they will try to discount it.

And here's another reference on link exchanges:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-real-problem-with-reciprocal-linking

cliffhanger;222845 wrote: Hello,

I read somewhere that the copyscape results for my site should be zero. It wasn't and to my shock I found that we have been using a link exchange program where we are giving people content which is duplicate to our webpage.

Now I know that this is bad, but really? how bad?

Second, I also heard, that Google frowns on any link exchange programs?

How far is this true?

Thanks. Sam

Weird, Sam. If you're doing link exchange you should expect your content to be duplicated. Webmasters do that to put content on their sites, but they credit the authors. Duplicate content doesn't harm your site's ranking or credibility. It simply doesn't improve it.

Which guys? Google? I don't think they actively devalue small amounts of reciprocals yet, but I know some real estate sites have been caught doing excessive reciprocal linking and have been penalized for it. I shouldn't say penalized - I think they just stopped those links from passing value.

For most of us a reasonable amount of reciprocal linking is harmless. However, it might not be worth much either - if Google can detect your reciprocal they'll simply devalue them so they become basically empty links. So they're not hurting anything but probably aren't helping either. Unless, of course, you get human traffic through them. That should be the real reason for doing reciprocal linking (see my last reference, above).

Thanks for posting that ink to the guidelines by the way - I hadn't seen a definitive reference stating that Google has a problem with reciprocals (just the post by Matt Cutts about excessive, off topic reciprocals .. but that could be what they're referring to here as well ).

Worst case scenario is that you get penalized by SE's for having duplicate contents - even if the original were yours

Google hates link exchange. But I am not sure about what your Copy thing is.

Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with that . They also don't have a problem with paid links when you buy them through Adsense. A lot of those directories would say that you're paying for someone to review the site and put it into the directory, which is a load of crap in a lot of cases. $300 at yahoo ??? That's a bought link, for sure.

So, there are some exceptions to that unnatural link statement. It's still definitely not a good idea to count on them for your rankings. Anything unnatrual that's working now could easily be devalued in the future.

I'm not sure if the word penalise is the right one, it's just less weight. There is bad talk about directories but it still works in my opinion, i guess a lot has to do with competiveness. A load of directory links is better than none at all

I notice a lot of people submit to directories with the same title/description, a double whammy of poorly thought out SEO!