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modifying borrowed content but making it look original to crawlers?

shags38

Top Contributor
Hi,

SEO is my weak point - well it is one of my 63 weak points actually.

I am still learning SEO - I currently am managing 7 sites and am increasing soon to about 40. Content being king in the eyes of Google means trying to come up with truck loads of original content and I really would like to have a couple of hours off each month.

So using other peoples articles, news releases etc (with permission - so no copyright issues) to what extent does the content have to vary to be seen as original, or not a direct copy, by the crawlers? 10%, 15%, more? Should the changes be throughout or specifically in the first few paras?

Does changing text format count as a change in text by the crawlers? i.e., a given text content ir reproduced word for word BUT a percentage of the text is changed to Bold, or italic or underline or a combination - also use of colours and " " etc, etc. Would the crawler notice that the html varies bold underline etc from the text file it is comparing it to?

If the above did indeed have the crawlers see the text differently it could save a lot of re-writing.

I look forward to any comments.

cheers,
Mike
 

FirstPageResults

Top Contributor
Experiment.. do something different on each of the sites, it's best way to get a feel for it.

Also the duplicate content penality is a myth, you can still get traffic without rinsing articles but just not as much as if you write your own quality content.

Put Wordpress on one of your sites, rewrite the title of the articles, tag them and then put them in appropriate categories. Get a few inbound links and add 3-4 articles a day.
 

Smile

Regular Member
I'm not the most qualified person to advice on SEO. However I do have some experience with it. Most of my basic understanding of the topic comes from an article I read on Smart Company. I wish I could find the article but I can’t find it anywhere. It was written by a guy who owns a number of Credit Card/Financial websites. I remember something along the lines of a 7 figure income just from one of his sites. (Not Australian based. But I think he was an Aussie.) Key points that I picked up were...

+Australia has a much older Google than the actual US based Google. (We are something like 4years behind.) So not all teachings you find in American based websites will apply to us. (At least this was the case when I read that article about a year ago.)

+ Too little or Too much is bad.

+ Page Rank can be visualized as PR 1 = 10^1.....PR9 = 10^9. Hence why its increasingly difficult to attain those ranks. (Higher the page rank, the better your search listing is)

+ To visualize the whole process mathematically, it can be illustrated with a Cartesian plane. (I drew this one from memory. So please excuse the amateurishness.)



- The black circle resembles a site which has used Black hat techniques such as Keyword stuffing or unusual amount of back links. (Or too little). Which essentially make them outliers.
- The dots parallel to the red line indicate natural sites.
- The red circle indicates the site with the most natural looking statistics. Usually known as the “authoritative” site for the particular key word.
- Traffic, Age of domain, Quality of domain and its content, Back link, Layout, Valid Html/xhtml, and myriad of other factors can be statistically summarized this way.

+ Bounce rate plays a significant role. Thats why its important to have relevant content with number of pages. Not just one static page.

+ If a website has a page rank of 5 and it has 100 outgoing links, then it essentially means that website is giving (5/100 = 0.05 = Link Juice) to each site. So it isn’t necessarily good to buy links from a PR5 website which gives out 100,000 out bound links. More link juice you get the better PR you get. Which equates to better ranking. (Laymens terms Quality Back linking rocks)

Now going on to answer your question Shags = WTF!
No im kidding...

From what I have read text formatting with-in articles does not increase your likelihood of ranking better. However I have also read that when giving a back link, we should [b*]keyword[/b*] the hyperlink. The reality is we cant know for sure. Because they things are so minor.

Most recently I just happen to launch 3 sites on the same day. Because I was on a deadline with a project. One site had roughly 3 original articles each spanning about 800 words each. The other two sites had roughly 10-12 articles which were copied from various online sources. Roughly 3 months later I checked their PR value. The website with the original content had PR3. While the other two sites were still PR0. They were on the same server but different word press layouts. Furthermore, I was getting a lot of traffic to the PR3 site via long tail searches. So I do believe content does play a big role in SEO. (Alongside back links and keyword rich domains.)

Furthermore, I know you have mentioned in the past that you have 1000-1200sites. If you are linking them to each other to gain back links...thats a very bad idea. Especially if all the sites are like PR0. Or if they are in the same IP address, Or if they have similar content.

I hope it helped to some extent. Sorry If I went off topic.
 
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WG2010

Archived Member
I think you missed the point Smile and I disagree with a lot of what you said but anyway here's my take on the article aspect as I cbf discussing the other points you brought up.

If you're going to use other peoples articles for your own sites, read it once and then summarise it. If you're creative enough, toss in your own opinion or pull facts out of your ass. That's the great thing about Google, it's not good at figuring out if what you say is factual or not but it will know what you're saying is unique.

If you're going to highlight your keywords don't use <bold>, use <strong> instead as well as italic and underlines. I've stopped doing that though and have been using <h3> to break my articles into 3 sections as it looks more visually appealing for the reader.

You can always outsource your content creation but I personally do it myself as I enjoy writing to an extent. It's not difficult nor time demanding to churn out 250 or 500 word articles that are unique (yet border on bullshit but then again why would I care, don't believe everything you read on the Internet!).
 

Smile

Regular Member
I think you missed the point Smile and I disagree with a lot of what you said


If I misinterpreted, sorry people!

As for the actual theory behind the dotpoints....as I said, they arent my findings. It was the take on some 'expert'.

However if you do get a chance please put forward your thoughts. Because I too am interested in distinguishing between fact and fiction.
As Im fairly new to it too.
 
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shags38

Top Contributor
Some really good input guys - some good stuff, one of the better threads I've been involved in so far in this forum (no crap ..... yet :) ) - in essence I agree with writing your own stuff and I too enjoy writing, I am actually writing a novel (up to 860 odd pages) but it is far too time consuming if you are doing it for multiple sites, that is the issue, if it was one or two sites then fine.

There are some things so far mentioned that I will try out - when I do I will keep some stats and post them.

GUGEL .......... 4 years behind ???? ....... I really struggle with that ........ he was either misquoted, misinterpreted or on something he shouldn't have been :).

Because I have a bunch of dot com domains when I search for non Australian sites or info I will delete the dot au in the google search in the address bar. Some have told me that it doesn't make a difference in respect to the search results shown but believe me it does - try it yourself - just do any search then when the results come up ctrl + N to open a dupilcate page then take the .au off in the address bar (leave everything else there) and compare the results. The Adwords and sponsored ads don't change (well I don't take much notice of them so maybe they do)

keep rolling with the input guys - very informative.

cheers,
Mike

p.s. OK - it's time I spilt the beans - the reason I am encouraging you guys to keep posting in this thread because I am getting 0.000006734 cents per letter :cool:
 
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Link

Regular Member
I am still learning SEO - I currently am managing 7 sites and am increasing soon to about 40. Content being king in the eyes of Google means trying to come up with truck loads of original content and I really would like to have a couple of hours off each month.

Hi Mike,

this isn't an exact response to your question about using content, but hopefully some sage advice. Have you thought about just focusing on 1 or 2 sites and learning more about SEO and where you can make money, before rolling out to 40+ sites?

At various times I have tried to manage too many sites and projects and it becomes not only frustrating and exhausting, but also counter-productive in many ways.

Content is important for SEO, but there is a lot more to it than just churning out content. There are lots of free resources on the net about SEO, find some reputable ones and start practicing what you learn on 1 or 2 sites. And don't sign up for any "miracle SEO secrets" courses for $997. Or even $27.

Once you know that it's working, then you'll be in a better position to roll out more sites. You'll get a lot more traffic from one site sitting on the front page of Google, than 40 sites sitting on page 7.

Just my two cents, I hope it helps.

Luke
 

djuqa

Top Contributor
Hi Mike,

this isn't an exact response to your question about using content, but hopefully some sage advice. Have you thought about just focusing on 1 or 2 sites and learning more about SEO and where you can make money, before rolling out to 40+ sites?

At various times I have tried to manage too many sites and projects and it becomes not only frustrating and exhausting, but also counter-productive in many ways.

Content is important for SEO, but there is a lot more to it than just churning out content. There are lots of free resources on the net about SEO, find some reputable ones and start practicing what you learn on 1 or 2 sites. And don't sign up for any "miracle SEO secrets" courses for $997. Or even $27.

Once you know that it's working, then you'll be in a better position to roll out more sites. You'll get a lot more traffic from one site sitting on the front page of Google, than 40 sites sitting on page 7.

Just my two cents, I hope it helps.

Luke
Good advice.
Than again it is even better to have 40 sites on page 1 for various search terms than just 1 or 2 sites.

However Number 1 Criteria for EFFECTIVE SEO is RELEVANT content. Not non-duplicate, keyword flooded or some cheaply produced $1 for 100 words goobly-gook. Just relevant to the intent and purpose of the site.
 
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James

Top Contributor
Umm it is pretty obvious if you rip other peoples articles Google will never even index your site if they do its not going to rank.

Make your own content is the best way to be, 100% unique content.

It will take you time but it will be worth it in the logn run.
 

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