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"I did factor X, will Google penalize my site?"
To that question, there is usually always the same simple answer.
If your competition can do factor X to your site, then Google will not penalize your site.
This has been mentioned plenty of times but I think people forget it.
A good example is people used to wonder if incoming links from shady networks could cause a penalization. The answer is a big NO. If it was yes, every SEO with a tricky hand would be signing up competitors to these shady networks.
The same goes for the Google Toolbar. It makes no sense that Google would track the sites you visit and then assess them as dupes. Simply put, I visit my competition just as much, if not more than my own site. Why hasn't Google figured these are duplicates? Because it doesn't do that :) [some of them are on the same class C, a large hosting provider]
If I'm wrong, please do correct me.
The answer is a big NO. If it was yes, every SEO with a tricky hand would be signing up competitors to these shady networks.
Not true. I have seen more than one example of a site being removed or penalized based soley on who was linking to them. These instances were verified by Google employees.
Now I'm not saying this is a common occurence. To the contrary, they seem to be fairly rare, isolated cases, but it has happened.
And if you dig through this site and read Google's comments on the subject, I'm pretty sure you will find the word almost used when this issue is discussed.
[google.com...]
"Fiction: A competitor can ruin a site's ranking somehow or have another site removed from Google's index.
"Fact: There is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. Your rank and your inclusion are dependent on factors under your control as a webmaster, including content choices and site design."
Problem is exactly what they mean is unclear. With large sums of money, I could get webmasters linking to a competitor to drop that link, and link to my site. This would have the effect of lowering the competitor's ranking.
Good point. When GG mentioned this a few weeks ago, the word almost was what stood out loudly for me.
If I was to create a site by directly copying the html of a competitors site. So the site was an exact match to the competitors and then link to the competitors site. Would this not be seen as duplicate content and hurt my competitor?
www.widgets.com
is doing well in the Serps, with respectable PageRank, and someone links to:
widgets.com
that Google may drop www.widgets.com (and it's PageRank) from the index in favor of widgets.com.
I've seen it happen to one of my pages, although not maliciously.
In reality A is good friends with 10 of them and does not know the rest and same is the case with B.
All friends are willing to provide excellent references. A gets 10 "hardest working person" votes from his friends. B is somewhat tricky. He tells 3 of his friends to lie and tell the recruiter that they worked with A and found him to be the "most miserable failure" and will never want to work him him.
Result:
A - 10 A+, 3 F
B - 7 A+
Whom will you hire as the "hardest working person"? Who you are sure is "hardest working person" and who you are not so sure about?
You can draw your own analogy with Google's selection process. :-)
Hmmm... someone is doing that to me right now! It's so rude!
I don't think it's hurting my site from the search engine point of view. The visitor leaves the copycat site to check mine and realizes that the copycat ripped off my site.
The reason that there is a link to my site from the copycat site is because I set up traps on my site to catch the copycats! Traps being a few faux names with links back to my site and a specific piracy page describing what the copycat has done.
;)
Google will (if anything) simply take the NEWEST duplicate content out of the index. This prevents someone doing this maliciously. However, if they copied your content before it got indexed, and then got theirs indexed first you would probably be the one to lose.
Hope that's not the case. As long as you don't link to them, it shouldn't hurt you.
No... Google has not removed this. I even sent a request to please remove the offending pages (to Google and the site owner) and it still is there.
>However, if they copied your
>content before it got indexed,
>and then got theirs indexed first
>you would probably be the one to lose.
In my case this site is new and just lazy and copying info from me and pretending it's theirs.
>Hope that's not the case. As
>long as you don't link to them,
>it shouldn't hurt you.
No way would I link to them! I do searches every now and then just to see who is linking to them and if I find someone, I write to the webmaster and request the link removed and why. They usually do remove it. They currently have only ONE link remaining to the site now.
;)
