Can I Sink Negative Information with Duplicate Content

Hi,

I own a company that has recently been smeared by a highly search engine friendly consumer complaint website. I used to work in SEO, but not for awhile and not for long. During that time period I learned that if duplicate URLs form my site were indexed that both/every one of those pages would perform worse in SERPs for relevant keywords. I took that experience and used it to sign up for the site and create a duplicate post (both duplicate title & article text), but since then the original has gone up in SERPs while the other has been creeping up.

My current strategy to avoid paying the site to remove the so called rip off is to submit an identical report at least once a week so that over time Google will penalize all version of the report on that site for duplicate content. Will that work or have I been out of the game for too long and Google has adjusted to only penalize duplicates instead of the original even if the same site appears to be spamming the same content?

i doubt this will work, i think you'll be better spending your time writing good reviews to make the bad one look like bs.

Won't work...

There are so many sites out there that in one way or another have duplicate content on them that Google would have to ignore a lot of good (duplicated) content that if it where to penalize everyone that have that content it would actually provide less valuable information to its users, and it lives by being able to provide the best information it can to users.

Otherwise another search engine will fill that gap... and Big G won't have that happen...

Before trying a strategy you should have at least thought things through.

a) If it's untrue send a C&D letter
b) Get over the fee and pay them
c) Diffuse it with good reviews, presses releases, etc.

I don't think a cease and desist will work.

Its a mixture of true and untrue information. I own a series of anonymous complaint sites similar to the one smearing me, but the difference is that mine let people edit records and this person is a former user. Like every user of mine he agreed to pay me money for violating my usage terms. Those terms include a condition against speaking in a manner that portrays the service in a negative light. This guy admits to violating my terms of use, but says he owes me nothing even though every time he says that he says my service is bad he owes me an additional $5,000 per statement. He he easily owes me over $100,000 in online comments alone.

Unfortunately all the evidence I have on him indicates that he lives with his mother and thus has no money to pay me. I even have a letter from his mother, a picture of him, and his address. Normally I would just program a bot to publish all information on him including an image of his mother's signature online for any identity their in the world to see. Unfortunately programming such a bot is useless because he published the information on a site that does not let users take information down, so even if I program the bot and give him a deadline for him to remove my info in exchange for me issuing the abort code he can't do it.

I think my best shot is to create multiple duplicate posts on that site before making one with an identical title, but unique body content. Then Google will penalize the duplicate content page in favor of the unique page containing my reward for his head.

I think it might work because I am posting the duplicate content on the site in which the report originated. I know lots of sites duplicate a lot of content, but I think if I make the original author look like a duplicate content spammer it may work.

No it will not work. You need to get all of the crap stuff off the 1st and 2nd pages also. Duplicate content will not do the trick. Submitting unique content to multiple article services will also not work. It can be done. It takes allot of work and money to do this. I can give you an estimate if you like. Don't even think about outsourcing this. And don't think that you can do all of this in a week. Google's new algo has made this even harder.

Hmm, so far the duplicate content thing isn't working. You would think Google would automatically categorize the site as spam for having the same article on multiple URLs, but its just showing the first one in the same place it was before with the others right below it and option to view more results from that website.

The site in question is Pissed Consumer and now they have a whole page featuring customer service information about my website. It even has my contact P.O. box and links to my sites Twitter, Facebook, and contact form pages. The links are nofollow, but I know Google still counts those a little, so I guess this is a good thing.


This search results so far are really surprising because in the past I have sank negative articles about me simply by posting links to them with irrelevant querystrings in the URLs if the site I targeted did not have a canonical link tag. The links would be on pages of little value thus not to help the sites pagerank.

I wouldn't be concerned about the contact info if it were not for the fact that it does not include the noticed posted above the P.O. box on the site itself that 30 days notice is required for requests involving a deadline of some kind. I'm concerned people may start mailing things that should be submitted electronically without realizing that it could take up to a month for their request to be processed.