I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw 4 different sites having the same content rank one after the other on Google for the search phrase “how to send tons of traffic to your adsense site“. I always thought that Google is strict about stuff like these but it appears that there’s a fluke in their system. Here’s a screenshot of the search results I saw at the time of this posting.
The URL of these 4 sites are:
- http://www.netseek.net/articles/7-Powerful-Ways-To-make-Money-From-Adsense-Using-Only-Free-Tools.asp
- http://websitetips.com/articles/marketing/adsensemoney/
- http://www.dcvinc.com/adsense/index.html
- http://www.cyberindian.com/web-marketing/google-adsense/7-powerful-ways-to-make-money-from-adsense.php
Does this mean that Google is only strict about duplicate sites and not merely duplicate content? Or is it just possible that no other sites rank well for this particular search term that all these 4 sites occupied the first 4 slots of the search results?
Whatever!!!
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:05 pm
I think they used the same article from those free article directories. Regarding duplicate content and Google, the way I understand it is that Google can only intervene when the site has pages within the domain with duplicate content. But when it comes to different domains having the same content, that is a case of plagiarism which Google doesn’t have a direct authority to intervene. The owner of the said article is advised to approach the webmaster, website owner or blogger about the issue. Then is instructed to file a DMCA complaint (http://www.google.com/dmca.html). However, when asked about such exceptions as you have seen yourself, Google will surely explain that they also consider the usefulness of the sites. Generally, the rules Google seems to follow are not cut-and-dried. In SEO there are always gray areas which Google seems to be exploiting.
July 11th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
very interesting! i might try this one LOL