tedster - 3:53 am on Nov 21, 2011 (gmt 0)

I want to emphasize that my ideas about correlation between widespread syndication and being wrongly Pandalyzed are my own conjecture, nothing proven and nothing officially communicated. It's just what seems to make the most sense for the cases that have me scratching my head. The idea comes from noticing a number of factors - the most important of which is what sites are now ranking for searches where the original source used to rank. And if it's accurate, it is NOT what Google would intend... instead it's what they still struggle with.

Remember that one month before the first Panda release Google rolled out their "Scraper" update [webmasterworld.com] At the time, I considered it an essential fix, and until Panda launched it seemed pretty darned good.

Since Panda 1.0 and up to right now, it really hasn't looked all that good to me. The situation has improved over the year, but scrapers (and syndicated sources) still outrank the original too often.

What I'm trying with one site is to ramp up every "we are the canonical source" signal I can muster, including authorship tagging, pubsubhubbub, delayed RSS, no more full RSS feeds, etc, etc. I'll let the forum know if it works.