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One of our clients just called to say that as a result of posting her articles online (places like Ezinearticles.com), her Google rankings fell off completely, and she’s been led to believe this is because she was penalized for duplicate content.
Has this happened to anyone else?
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A series of posts documenting Marketing Mentor's search for a new tagline and what happened when we opened up the discussion to the Marketing Mentor community.
Ilise, I have heard of this happening before. One way I have heard that writers get around this problem is by rewriting the article a little bit each time they repost so google doesn't see it as duplicated.
That's a tad more difficult (read: impossible) when RSS feeds are picking up the articles via syndication. I'm not sure what the answer would be in that case.
Posted by: Pamela Saxon | June 29, 2010 at 11:17 PM
Ilise,
I was RE-posting articles on Ezine and Self-Growth (and others) that I'd already published in my newsletter, and which reside on my website.
Google punished me for this by removing me from search rankings altogether and only reinstated me after I'd removed the offending articles from as many places as I could and submitted an appeal to them. As a result I was not find-able via organic search on Google for over 6 months.
Definitely not good for business.
The way around this is to publish articles that are not "too similar" to what you've already published. Google Webmaster Guidelines goes into this in great detail.
Let me know if you have any questions about it. It happened to me!!
Ann
Posted by: Ann Bingley Gallops | June 30, 2010 at 11:35 AM
There are programs that will automatically edit articles by about 10-20% into multiple versions.
This is why article submission services have become so controversial.
Posted by: Stacey Morris | June 30, 2010 at 03:20 PM
I was in a SEO seminar a few weeks ago and the "expert" said that Google has changed the policy of penalizing duplicate articles because the original author was getting penalized. The rumor is now that it is all ignored (ranking-wise) except for the original article.
The real issue might actually be that the article site is too varied in the topics. Being linked to anything that might be perceived as a "link farm" (soul-less portal that exists only for SEO) is apparently grounds for a negative ranking.
Disclaimer: This info may not be accurate.
Posted by: David Salmassian | July 01, 2010 at 07:03 PM