Matt Cutts: Google Algo Change Targets Dupe Content

[tristanperry]

[news.ycombinator.com...]

Earlier this week Google launched an algorithmic change that will tend to rank scraper sites or sites with less original content lower. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content. An example would be that stackoverflow.com will tend to rank higher than sites that just reuse stackoverflow.com's content. Note that the algorithmic change isn't specific to stackoverflow.com though.

I know a few people here on HN had mentioned specific queries like [pass json body to spring mvc] or [aws s3 emr pig], and those look better to me now. I know that the people here all have their favorite programming-related query, so I wanted to ask if anyone notices a search where a site like efreedom ranks higher than SO now? Most of the searches I tried looked like they were returning SO at the appropriate times/slots now.

I know there's an existing thread for SERP/algo changes, although this mainly seems to be a 'new' development in that it relates to further tackling dup content scrapers. Mods feel free to merge with an existing thread if needed though.

From Matt Cutts Blog:

I just wanted to give a quick update on one thing I mentioned in my search engine spam post.

My post mentioned that “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week.

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

[mattcutts.com...]

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 9:22 pm (utc) on Jan 28, 2011]
[edit reason] Added link for the Cuttlets [/edit]

[trakkerguy]

Do we have some positive reports, rather than puzzling over lost traffic

Yes, I did have a URL jump from #11 to 6 on the 27th for the second biggest kw in it's niche, and it does seem to be a result of the farm update.

This is a site I bought last year, and the prior owner wrote extremely long, well written origional content. (I often buy sites of failed or discouraged competitors)

I've often thought the pages were TOO LONG, but never quite got around to chopping them up. It SEEMS these long pages may have helped, as I have not noticed any appreciable change in any of my other sites or URLs.

The fact that only the one site/url with the most/best written content improved seems to indicate that in this particular case Google actually hit the target. My sympathies to all those who weren't so lucky this time.

[edited by: trakkerguy at 7:08 pm (utc) on Jan 30, 2011]

[pontifex]

@Brett: the "low quality on page" and this "dupe check" noise we suddenly hear in the past 10 days are IMHO related. I would not disregard a strong relationship between these 2 "major" algo changes as you did in the response to this post! In fact I do believe these are both on-page measures and are both implemented at the same spot in their ranking process.

Further, I do vote for "Seedfinder" update... at least they TRY to find the seed of that content :->

[trakkerguy]

@pontifex: Totally agree that the dupe check/low quality issue is related to the content farm issue. Small percentage of quality origional content is probably important part of their definition of content farm

[tedster]

For now I'm going to try the "Farm Update". It's pretty self-explanatory for anyone who's following the plot, so in the future it will be an easy to understand reference.

[AussieWebmaster]

want this update called Taco Bell

[trakkerguy]

Word from some blackhatters is they are deindexing some autoblog networks, but others are still doing fine (so far).

[Brett_Tabke]

> Farm

Not the way I read this at all - this update was about dupe content - not low quality original content.

"Earlier this week Google launched an algorithmic change that will tend to rank scraper sites or sites with less original content lower. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content. An example would be that stackoverflow.com will tend to rank higher than sites that just reuse stackoverflow.com's content.

That is not about so called content farms like About.com. That statement is about dupe content.

Show me where Matt says anything about content farms?

I am willing to concede that there may be a wink-and-a-nod going on here where Matt doesn't want to use the 'farm' word because of legal fallout, but I didn't read this as pointing at content farms yet. I think we need to get this story right. This is very important to alot of people.

[tedster]

I see what you mean, Brett. The lines were blurry because of the timing with other Google discussions.

So where to now? More ideas?

[aakk9999]

That is dupe content start-to-finish.

That's going to be harder to name...

Synonyms: duplicate, reduplicate, double, repeat, replicate, reproduce

"Dupe update" ?

<added>
"Plagiarism update" ?
(but does not roll off the tongue so well...)
</added>

[edited by: aakk9999 at 2:17 am (utc) on Jan 31, 2011]

[Brett_Tabke]

> Why would anyone be worried about something that only affects 2%
> of the queries, unless the queries are limited the specific verticals?

(grin) What do you think we are talking about when we talk about "long tail"? It lives down there in the single digit percentages of all searches. (remember, 20% of all Gmail users do not realize you don't have to go to google.com and type Gmail into the search box to get to Gmail).

I hear you pontifex, but on 5-6 pet kw's where content farms live, I can't see a single change to those serps.

Type just about any tech query with 'how to' and the usual suspects are still there in the top 30'ish on almost any query. The ones that were top 10, are still there.

We will know more tomorrow when the stock market opens ;-) (watch that company's stock that just IPO'd last week ;-)

[tedster]

Zombie Update?
Ripoff Update?
Imposter Update?

[Webwork]

Doppelganger [google.com...]

[indyank]

How about "Update dupduped" or just "dupduped" where the first dup stand for duplicates and "duped" stands for how google dealt with them :)

[indyank]

u should spell it as "dapdapped" though it is "dupduped"... duples get duped by google... lol

[outland88]

that will tend to rank scraper sites or sites with less original content lower

No mention of removal of scrapers only just ranking them lower. They certainly don't want to totally damage that Adsense income coming from the duplicates.

[agent10]

The only main change I can see in the UK for specific insurance terms is that the comparison sites now hold positions 1 - 5 across all the categories. Perhaps this algo change affected other areas too.

[mercedesP]

"Copycat update"?

[rustybrick]

Well, from the previous post Google made it sound like the algo for dup content was already designed. But he didn't say "live" although he did imply it was there. So one would assume this post was a bit more about content farms. I do suspect they go well together, low quality content and dup content somewhat related to content farms...

[icedowl]

Echoes...

[nuthin]

I just seen the topic of this thread and thought I drop in to let you know what has happened to our main site over the past few weeks.

A competitor has stolen/copied our home page content and posted it on about 80 or so blogs to fill those pages full of 'dummy text' and has used their own anchor text for our industries leading keyword placed throughout the copy of those pages.

Now all of a sudden since this has happened we have dropped from page 2 to page 5 and rapidly declining for that main keyword and that competitor who is brute forcing Google is now on the first page.

I thought your competitors can't harm you?

This is the first time that I have gone in and researched why we have dropped and have come to the conclusion that it's some sort of aggressive change in the duplication filter.

When you click 'Latest' and see major portions of our home page copy on all of these sites popping up every 2nd day for the past 3 weeks, it's the only conclusion based on years of experience that makes sense.

Now what ? I was so concerned today that this is the likely cause that we had new copy written for the home page. Now will be interesting to see if they use that ?

It's a sad state of affairs if this is truly the case.

[TheMadScientist]

Doppleganger + 1

[TheMadScientist]

I thought your competitors can't harm you?

You really have to split hairs to 'get' the word from G sometimes...

There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. (Emphasis Mine) [google.com...]

When you think there are probably 1,000,000 things a competitor can do online then less than 1000 would be 'almost' nothing in someone's opinion, right? The 'almost nothing' statement is highly subject to the interpretation of what constitutes 'almost' nothing.

Maybe 1 or 2; Maybe 10 or 15; Maybe 200 or 300...
How many someone might guess depends on their interpretation of almost nothing.

[nuthin]

The thing is the the blog spam is so amateurish, it's likely the competitor is simply using some automated blog spamming software that creates scraped content 'article' blog postings and all they have to do is <insert anchor text> and the tool does the rest.

For Google to then go and reward that type of behaviour, punish the original and true authoritive source of the content and then publicly throughout the years deny that blog spamming doesn't work is beyond belief.

Oh well, I'm here for the long term.. Google usually gets it right so will await to see the outcome as it plays out.

I suppose blog spammers, article/forum spammers who drop anchor text on garbage might come out the front to be truly the ones we should call "SEO's" :)

Eventful day... sleep.

[TheMadScientist]

The thing is the the blog spam is so amateurish, it's likely the competitor is simply using some automated blog spamming software that creates scraped content 'article' blog postings and all they have to do is <insert anchor text> and the tool does the rest.

1.) That's probably only the front end of the system you're seeing... How many external 'minty fresh' links go to that 'minty fresh' page to make it 'more important for minty freshness' than you have?

2.) The thing you have to remember about the algo is it's not a person... They can check grammar to see if it is well written, they can check spelling, they can find related words and phrases to see if they're used at the right percentage, but what they cannot do is read it like a person and determine if it's junk or not.

[drall]

Well you had it right Tedster, we regained almost all positons yesterday. Seems it took about 5 days for them to sort it out after the new algo was put live.

So it would seem at least in our case we are no longer collateral damage. Hopefully Matt and his team recognized the problem.

[mromero]

outland88 I would support ANNIHILATION of scraper / content farms.

Ranking them lower is a wink and a slap on the wrist to buy them time to figure out a way to game the system again. The guys that run these outfits are the best in the business and probably hanging out here ;o)

[patc]

Does anyone else see correlation between these updates and a mid Jan (12-13th in my case) drop? I'm trying to understand if it is a dupe penalty I'm suffering, as had a competitor scrape my site in December and sent thousands of people from #*$! sites to it. (they kept my stats code on the page stupidly so I saw it happening).

Convinced this is the reason for my drop but have passed through one reconsideration request with no joy after having got the scraper site taken down.

[MelissaLB]

Any opinions on using small snippets of wiki info on a page? it's always been a practice of ours to add a small (maybe 2 lines or a short para.) piece of wiki content to a description of a product we sell. This is in addition to our own unique product description.

Any opinions on this practice? We are not an information site, we are an e-commerce site and not reproducing the content for purposes of ranking where wikipedia would, in fact, there really should be no occurrence where one of our pages and one of wikipedia's pages would show up for the same search tern.

Any thoughts? should we be worried that this is/will effect us negatively? should we stop? should we remove wiki content from our site?

thanks!

[crobb305]

Scrapegate Update

[blend27]

Doppleganger + 1

from that link above:

Doppelgangers are monstrous humanoids, identified primarily by their ability to change their shape and appearance to mimic almost any humanoid creature. ...