Kenneth Dreyer blog

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been studying how Google threats duplicated content on new domains. I’ve been using four different sites in this study, divided into two categories. I’ve been using travel as niche for this study.

Group 1: Unique content, many pages.

In Group 1 both sites had unique content, but many sites with various changes. The first site had only 200+ pages and the other had 2000+ pages. The content on all the pages didn’t vary that much, mostly just keywords in the title, h1 tag and a few places in the main text.

Both sites got indexed in less than 24 hours, but only the front page. Both sites seem to get new sites indexed in the same speed. Google took one level a time in the hiarchive.

Conclusion: Google does not punish you for having up to thousands of pages with few changes in the content. The sites even ranked well.

Group 2: Copied content

In group to I did two tests where I copied content from the top sites on the keyword I was trying to rank for. One the first site I only had copied content on the front page and on the second I added a few paragraphs of content I had written myself.

Both sites got indexed in less than 24 hours, but neither one of them showed up in the search results.

Solution and Conclusion: I edited both sites with unique content and it took less than 24 hours before both sites showed up in the rankings. The conclusion is that you cannot copy content from already existing sites.

Conclusion

There have been a lot of talking about what kind of duplicated content will get you punished, but I yet seen anyone put their finger on what kind of duplicate content will get you put in the box by Google. Well, like you can see in my report you won’t get punished for using a script that auto generates thousands of pages with few changes in the content. But you will get punished if you copy content from someone else.

So what did we learn from this? Produce your own content and don’t steal. Simple as that.