Similar sites will perish - where can you build a difference to win?

[Whitey]

In Nov 2010 Tomer Honen & Kaspar Szymanski on the Google Search Quality Team came out indicating that sites that are " similar" will perish. Althoiugh specific to multisites, it's thinking applied to all "similar" sites. Thinking to create the Panda algo was probably well established then and ready to go. Indeed they state that the algo was already good at identifying these.

From a user’s perspective, these sorts of repetitive sites can constitute a poor user experience when visible in search results. Luckily, over time our algorithms have gotten pretty good at recognizing similar content so as to serve users with a diverse range of information. We don’t recommend creating similar sites like that; it’s not a good use of your time and resources.

There are many websites dealing with common and popular services like holiday planning, price comparisons or foreign exchange currency trading. It frequently doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel and compete with existing broad topic sites. [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]
Repeatedly, I hear from folks who are complaining that their "quality" sites have been hit. Digging deeper, most seem to talk about the same thing in a different way.

So where are the winning edges that Google likes. What onpage specifics are they rewarding in the algo?

[aristotle]

On my sites I always make sure to provide some information that no other site has. So far it's always worked.

[dstiles]

When google decided that the web was no longer world wide but local and implemented their geo-location garbage, many of us with UK domains trading internationally had to suddenly run up a COM. We couldn't drop the UK site because established customers WORLD WIDE expected it.

For my own customers, I tried to make the COM different to the UK with links to the primary site but the principle remains: because of google we HAD to create more web sites, despite the original ones working well at the time.

Now they complain about too many sites with too similar a content.

Sheesh! What a bunch of clowns!

[walkman]

Repeatedly, I hear from folks who are complaining that their "quality" sites have been hit. Digging deeper, most seem to talk about the same thing in a different way.

You mean that only one site in the entire world can write about cars, football, dog grooming, iPads....or how to do Apache rewrites?

What if you had a site for 12 years and as time passed others did 'similar' sites, who should get penalized by Panda? It's really convenient to have a catch all excuse for google: 'Your site is not unique, they are sites similar to yours.' Ya think?

[scooterdude]

and who has been buying up web properties in those areas mentioned recently , hmmm

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Backlinks, I see sites with spun text ranking top 10 purely on the strength of backlinks.

I own 3 different 300+ page sites with nothing but lengthy unique and very helpful hobby related articles, written by me, that I have not ever done any backlink building for. You guessed it, less than 50 visitors per day on these.

[Rasputin]

I suppose that's quite amusing from a company like google that just launched their own hotel review and price comparison site (http://www . google.com/hotelfinder/), not to mention the many other business areas they have moved in on over the last 12 months.

Perhaps they will now start penalising themselves for just copying what other people have already done?

[HuskyPup]

many of us with UK domains trading internationally had to suddenly run up a COM.

And I had to do exactly the opposite. For some reason they decided that my .com was only international and nothing to do with the UK therefore I had to build my .co.uk site whereas previously it was simply pointed at the .com

As it so happens it's worked out well with all the .co.uk pages ranking on the first page interestingly though my sister's UK only business was built on a .com and ranks very well...I assume that has to do with Google Places etc.

[dstiles]

> I assume that has to do with Google Places etc.

I would be more inclined to assume it's due to google stupidty etc.

[piatkow]

@HuskyPup
Were your .com and your sister's .com hosted in the same location?

[HuskyPup]

@piatkow - Yep, been on the same UK servers as all my sites since the late 90s, only 3 different hosts in that time, the same host and server location for the past 5-6 years now.