luckychucky - 6:51 pm on Dec 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

An overzealous duplicate content penalty makes a lot of sense for my site. I have hundreds of individual product pages. After awhile it gets tedious + ridiculous to try creating absolutely fresh content for each one. What I tend to do is optimize for whatever keyword happens to need firming up at the moment that I enter new products, whatever's a bit sluggish in the rankings at the time.

So, if 5 new items come in, I'll create 5 pretty much identical pages all optimizing for the same keywords, with the same text. Next 5 products, a different set of keywords and a different piece of descriptive blahblah. Face it, a commercial site offering hundreds or even thousands of products, all unified under the same general industry header, is going to have a lot of overlaps in the verbiage -- and still be totally dead-on relevant to the search.

Google doesn't mind this. Yahoo apparently does.

The other thing is that, although I'm in every obscure and relevant directory out there, plus I have a real solid set of links & backlinks (all created around 3 years ago right after initial site launch) I haven't done a single link exchange with anyone in well over 2 years. SEO via link exchanges is such a transparent game, and by now I look at link exchange solicitation eMails as an almost pure form of spam.

By the looks of things, using my own site as the Petri dish, Google seems to agree with that view of link exchanges: again, no new links since well over two years now, and I'm still solidly sitting at #1, like an iron doorstop, unmoveable.

Yahoo's still guided by some dark ages paradigm, long ago outmoded by ever-evolving Internet reality.

Just gotta repeat: Google keeps me literally stuck at number one position. I don't even budge for most of the money kw's in my trade. Logic dictates I must be at least somehwat relevant to those searches, eh? ...but I don't even exist on Yahoo. I do mean z-e-r-o rankings. Nowhere. Zip. Bupkus. Non-entity.

Pathetic.