Duplicate Content, Manual Action, and Multiple Sites?

[Vantelli]

Hey guys,

A few weeks ago several of my websites were penalized by Google for duplicate and thin content. All in 3 minutes.

I have 7-8 sites with product reviews (products from the particular industry). There are 100-300 posts on each website. All posts are written by my writers, 100% original texts, 800-1500 words long, in comparison to other small publishers which are still around my sites are much better.

No, there is no affiliate links on my sites. I just provide information like specifications, prices, pros, cons and monetize sites with AdSense.

My articles were maybe too optimized, title tags were maybe keyword stuffed, there was some duplicate content (product details like colors, memory, price and things that you can't write in another way).

I decided to improve one website first, to submit it for reconsideration and to see what will happen. I invested in a new, professional WP theme, professional logo. Writers fixed titles and subtitles in each article, we de-optimized content, all typos are fixed... I have a long list of all changes we made. It now looks like really new site with improved bounce rate and average session duration.

After 8 days my site is rejected.

Now I think it's not at all about my content. My sites are not the best in the World, but they're above average sites with decent content. Not spam at all.

Right now I think that I'm penalized for having multiple sites in the same niche. Let's say that I have 5 sites about smartphones and on each site I have a review of HTC 10 smartphone. Each of these reviews is unique and useful for visitors, it provide information they're looking for. But I think there are chances that Google consider all my sites as one big site, so it's like to have 5 reviews of HTC 10 on the same site, which is duplicate content.

I'm now thinking to merge all my sites into one site and to redirect other sites to it. Do you think we're not allowed to have multiple sites in one niche? Should we, instead, focus on one site only? Is it deleting all but one site what Google expect me to do to lift a manual action?

Prior a manual action all my sites performed very very good so I guess the Google algorithm liked them. This could be important - I sold one of these sites to a guy who didn't made any changes since he bought it. Moreover he is buying now new content from me, which means the same writers are working on it. That website is not penalized just because it is not anymore in my Search Console account.

So, my main question is - do I have to merge all sites into one and to keep only that one, or that will not help me to get out of the penalty?

Thanks

[Robert Charlton]

Vantelli, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

Right now I think that I'm penalized for having multiple sites in the same niche.

That's maybe an oversimplification but I'm guessing that the large degree of similarity, along with the general spammy nature of the sites made Google want to take these down. You make a good case for the demotions. ;)

Also...
a) Are the sites also hosted together?
b) Do they interlink?
c) Are the inbound links from independent sources, or are they from shared sources?

Because the site that was sold has performed well, I'm thinking that the answers to some of these questions will be yes... ie, I assume that the other site has changed its hosting and has gotten its own links. I've seen this happen, and yes, common inbound link sources and signs of interconnection among sites with similar content are the likely causes.

I think your idea to merge the sites into one is a good approach, but it's likely that it's not just the content, but also your inbound linking which has been penalized. Any kind of redirecting to a new site that tries to preserve inbound links from your old sites has a good chance of redirecting the penalty as well. I think you'll be facing the same problem faced by sites hit by Penguin when they tried to move to a new domain.

Did any of the sites have much non-search traffic, or was it entirely about traffic from the serps?

[Vantelli]

Thank you, Robert

I'll try to answer your questions:

a) Are the sites also hosted together? - Yes, they are. All on the same server.

b) Do they interlink? No, they don't.

c) Are the inbound links from independent sources, or are they from shared sources? - I almost give up any link building during 2015. I barely created any links for my sites, just one strong backlink for maybe 4 of 8 sites. Those backlinks are on different subdomain of the same domain (example aaa.domain.com links to my site no.1, bbb.domain.com links to my site no.2 etc). Most of I backlinks I have are organic, they're on forums, posted by guys who're passionate about products I'm reviewing.

Did any of the sites have much non-search traffic, or was it entirely about traffic from the serps? - It was like 90% from Google, a few percents from Bing, Yahoo and referral links..

Yes, the site that was sold is now on different servers, in different Search Console and Analytics acc, but I doubt that the new owner created any backlinks in the meantime.

I don't think backlinks could be the problem. During 2012-2015 almost each algo update has bad impact on my old sites. Later I noticed that my sites perform better if just post content and don't build any links. Everything was perfect from the mid of 2015 until this manual action. I created content, published it, there was more and more organic traffic each week and suddenly I received those notification about manual action.

I forgot to mention that info on 'About Us' pages is fake, as well as whois info. The idea was to confuse competitors, not search engines. I fixed that on the website I submitted for reconsideration, but obviously that wasn't helpful.

I invested thousands of dollars in the content, one of my sites was included in Google news... Now I'm worried that Google will chase me around and will penalize each new site I start just because its mine. I was an SEO for several years, and from time to time I use some tricks like obtaining a strong link, fine tuning anchor text on internal backlinks etc but I really do not use any black hat techniques or something like that.

The biggest problem for me is that there's no way to communicate with the Google spam team. I really want to improve my sites and to fix the issue but I really don't see what's the problem. I just need them to tell me "remove this, don't do that, fix this".

I was sure I'm doing everything right this time, traffic increase was a confirmation for that, I thought I'm finally penalty and panda-penguin free. My intention was never to trick search engines... That's why I'm surprised and not really sure what should I do.

[aristotle]

I've read here in other cases speculation that a site usually won't be released from a manual penalty until a certain amount of time has passed, especially if you keep submitting re-consideration requests over and over again every few weeks. Perhaps the idea is that you're expected to put a lot of work and time into improving the site before the penalty will be lifted..

[Vantelli]

One more thing - I noticed that a lot of spammers copied my content and publish it on their own sites. Some of them are even using my articles as video descriptions for their YT videos. Do you think this could be the reason why I'm penalized for duplicate content?

@Aristotle - It will be very interesting if we find out if anyone managed to lift a manual action after the first reconsideration request. I have a feeling that websites are not reviewed by a human at all.

[Vantelli]

Guys, is it possible that my sites are penalized for duplicate content because some pricks copied my articles and posted them all around? I'm worried especially about articles posted on Youtube as video descriptions. Perhaps Google think all these articles belongs to YT because of it's authority. So if you have a site with 300 posts and 200 of them are copied and posted elsewhere, would that trigger a manual action?

[Robert Charlton]

Vantelli - Quick answer for now... no, it's more likely that your sites were too similar to each other, and that together with the hosting setup and the apparent coordination of all sites involved, and your link sources (viz, the lack of variety in your inbound linking), the whole setup appears to be spammy. You've now been penalized, so almost anything might rank above you. Lots of scrapers, I'm sure, capitalize on this... but it's not just about the text that they've copied... it's about the entire setup that makes your text look even worse than it might be on a site not hosted and linked and duplicated on the same server as your other sites are.

I do think that maybe you're in denial about what Google would see as your obvious effort to get multiple places for similar content in the serps, and I've posted more thoughts on this follow-up discussion which you started here....

Does Google Penalize Webmasters?
Oct 12, 2016
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4821975.htm [webmasterworld.com]

...I'm guessing, it's maybe because you don't understand the difference between dupe content and reworded content, where the rewording doesn't really change any information. To a degree, it might be a subtle point. You may also not understand why it is that reworded content under certain hosting and linking conditions might make Google think that you're spamming.

The conditions that probably apply to you...
- 7 or 8 similar Made-For-Adsense sites
- on the same server
- with backlinks that could appear to be coordinated
- from sources that are clearly related.

These are all classic spam indicators, and simply reworking the content on one of the apparently coordinated sites might be interpreted as more of an intent to spam,,, more, say, than similarities of content spread over unrelated sites would suggest an intent to spam. .

There's historical background for this that goes back over many years, and deserves a much longer discussion, and it might be helpful for someone, like you, who I assume has taken very old SEO advice and tried to apply it in the current day. Google, in one of its patents, suggests that coordinated actions are a spam indicator. Unfortunately, I have no time for further detail now, but I hope others will jump in.

But as I'm (perhaps imperfectly) understanding what you've described, you have a classic spammy setup, at least for Google.

[Vantelli]

Hey Robert, thank you very much for the message, it seems you really understand what's the problem with my sites and my whole business model. When I started all these sites I just thought they will compete each other just as websites of different owners compete. I thought what matters for Google is content, not the owner. For me it was always like "why to have one site with 1000 visitors when I can scale the whole process and make 10 sites (=10,000 visitors)?", but obviously I was wrong.

I came to the forum to ask you guys to help me with my dilemma - Should I merge all sites into one (and delete the rest of them) or not? I think I said that sites are still making some money and it would be a loss if I delete all sites but one, but fail to revoke a manual action for that one.

What you would in my place?

[NickMNS]

Vantelli, your logic is flawed, 1 site = 1000 does not scale linearly to 10 sites = 10000 visitors. For any given search term or pool of terms or better yet niche, you have a finite number of searches. If you have ten sites all targeting the same niche, the best you could hope to achieve is rank your sites from position 1 to 10. (this is obviously an over simplification) say your top site is getting 1000 visitor, each subsequent site will get fewer and fewer visitors.

Now in the real world you will never be able to achieve this. Then consider the resources required to maintain and populate 10 sites instead of 1. One would expect that since you are taking resources away from your top site to create an inferior site, not even your top site will be optimal and more then likely you will have competitors that out rank you. So the question then becomes, can 10 ten sites of varying quality generate more traffic, than 1 site of top quality? My guess would be that the 1 great site will win because all the links, and all the users will pointing to a single source.

Now regarding the issue if Google will follow you and penalize your one site, just because it penalize the others. I don't think that it in most cases Google knows or even cares who owns a site. If you employ a set of tactics that Google penalizes, they will penalize you for those tactics, whether you use them on one site or ten sites. If you scrap ten sites and start from scratch with one new domain, but remploy the same tactics that got you penalized before (eg: using the same over-optimized content, link graph, etc...) then you can expect to be penalized. If you truly start from scratch, re-hash your content with focus on quality and natural writing then it is unlikely that Google will penalize you again.

[Vantelli]

Hey Nick, thanks for the reply. Actually, it worked for me until the penalty. Let's say that you publish a review about the product XY on your website A and your website B. Your website A ranks for it on the position 5 and your website ranks for it on the position 12. But the review for product ZY on website B ranks on the position 2, and the same review on website A ranks on the position 10... If you cover all products with as much as possible reviews, you'll have more traffic. Some site will rank better for one product, other site will rank better for another one.

I just now released that my Alt tags and image names are full of keywords. There are 20 photos in each post and each of them starts with the name of product + descriptive keywords. For example:

Galaxy-Note-7-black-in-case.jpg, Galaxy-Note-7-pen-case.jpg, Galaxy-Note-7-screen.jpg, Galaxy-Note-7-side-view-black.jpg, Galaxy-Note-7-side-view-silver-case.jpg

Alt tags are the same as file names.

Could this keyword stuffing in alt tags be a reason for the penalty?

[NickMNS]

There is no doubt that some pages will rank better than others for some terms. But the question is would those pages still rank as well if they were all on the same site. I would tend to think so. The main reason, assuming multiple sites, is that any links pointing to a specific page is keeping the benefit only for that specific site. Having all the pages on one sites would allow that one site to benefit from all the links pointing any of those pages.

Could this keyword stuffing in alt tags be a reason for the penalty?

I think it depends, if you the file names / alt tags are really accurately describing what is in the picture, then I would say no, this is what Google is recommending. However if you are not describing what is on the picture, eg: Galaxy-Note-7-Best-Price-Buy-Now.jpg then I would be more concerned. Also the alt-tag is supposed to describe what is on the image in the event that the image is not displayed, that is what you seem to be doing.

Don't forget to add the image Galaxy-Note-7-exploding-in-case.jpg. :o)

[Vantelli]

My alts are descriptive, maybe too much descriptive. I tend to mention all details visible in the photo. Especially if that is something users may search for. There is up to 10 words in alt tags which is not too much, but I'm afraid some of them appears too often.

You're right it's better to have one site when it comes to links to points to your content. However, I do not create any links anymore (more damage than benefits in my case) and I don't believe in "organic link building". From time to time, some people link organically to my content, but that's one link in 6 months... That can't push your site in the top 10 quickly.

Not sure what to do with all these images... In case that photos are overoptimized, should I edit only alt tags (to deoptimize them) or I have to replace images (for less optimized file names)?

[Vantelli]

Robert, in my another Topic you wrote "The Bing traffic, I think, is also a bit of a clue about what your Google problems are." Could you please let me know what exactly you mean?

Here's the link to the topic I mentioned: [webmasterworld.com...]

[tangor]

Too much of anything can be bad, just as too little. With product images a front and back make sense, and a side view can be useful, but more than that (unless very detailed close up of some specific feature) won't add bells and whistles.

[Vantelli]

Guys, hundreds of my articles are published on Youtube as video descriptions. I believe that was part of someone's negative SEO campaign. I sent to YT a few DMCS cases, but they didn't even replied.

What bothers me the most now is that I can't use my content anymore. Or I can? That's what I want to ask you. If I just ignore the fact that my content is all around YT and move my articles to a new site, do you think it will have any chances to rank? Should I just give up and create new content or I still can do something?