Case study - Has King Content been dethroned?

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d_nov

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Few weeks ago I wrote a 100% original article on my gaming niche website and submitted it to N4G, a video game news aggregator. It got featured and I was getting tons of traffic for a few days.

Today I googled the article title with quotation marks and holy shit...The N4G submission (that links to me) is ranking #1, 2-6 are sites with my title copypasted word for word, all with Read More links to N4G and barely any text. My original article is all the way down at #7, even with the mini link pyramid. Except for #4, that doesn't even open because of a Fatal PHP error.

Interestingly enough, the N4G submission is dated June 10, while #2-6 are dated June 9. How the hell can pages dated June 9 use a page dated June 10 as a source? I know you can change the post date on the site, but shouldn't Google's awesome algorithms notice a time paradox? If they don't, then here's a new blackhat method.

Just more proof that Google does not have its shit together and you shouldn't put all your eggs in the SEO basket.

I've made some screenshots of the SERPS, but decided against posting them in a public thread. If interested, PM me and I'll show you.
 
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That's Google for you. Google is spouting left and right about quality content and original content, yet their algorithm is a big fail on noticing who really owns the article.

In my case, sometimes site that use automatic scrapper ranks higher than me.
 
That is bizarre, did Google index the other site first? If so that could be the reason? Otherwise its just Google being typically unreliable. Do you use the authorship tool? Google have gone on quite a lot about that being useful to identify original author.
 
News websites are even worse. Google a story title and there are pages and pages of the same story word for word. Talk about massive duplicate content.
 
I actually contemplated creating a thread on the subject of effectively stealing other people's content but changed my mind because it's just wrong.

Essentially, these aggregators are likely scraping the content from the site regularly and reposting it with a date prior to the article before either get indexed. So Google sees the date for the article as being live first and interprets it as the original. There's some other ways to fake it too but that's most likely what you're seeing.
 
That's why I'm here. Because G sucks a$$. </vent> Hey, have you thought about doing a google authorship on any new content you publish? Maybe that would prevent that from happening in the future? It is supposed to but I haven't tried it yet. Cheers!
 
Yeah, google any news story and their "top" results are always copied - who knows who wrote the original content. The date thing is interesting - perhaps they make allowances for edited updates. Might be worth backdating some topical content to see what happens!
 
Now a days, you can have a website one a certain niche. One niche in particular, pull different articles on that one niche, repost them, and you'll still rank well.

I know alot of websites that do this, that I visit on a regular basis.
 
ryannull said:
News websites are even worse. Google a story title and there are pages and pages of the same story word for word. Talk about massive duplicate content.
Click to expand...

Hey ryannull, please do not confuse duplicate with syndicated content. Duplicate content is the same content on the same domain. Syndicated one is the same content on different domains. Google does not have anything against syndicate content as also the OP's results show.
 
This is because that site has a higher trust factor then the site the original article came from. Think of it like this.. If I copied your homework once and got straight A's from all my other work and you told the teacher I copied you who is she going to believe. Well with a good track record and no proof who ever has more trust usually.
 
My syndicated content is working like a charm and thanks for the post op. I was able to get a few my articles featured on major RE websites.
 
Just let google get them, sooner or later they will see your the original source.
 
Thanks for the response everyone. I gave up on SEO for viral promotion a while ago, so I just wanted to present a counterpoint to the "Content is King" paradigm rather than find a solution. Still, I will check out the authorship tool so kudos for that.
 
My opinion is you can have a website one a certain niche.One niche of particular and pull different article in one niche ,repost the article and you will rank well.
 
n4g website is more trusted, so it's upper that you.
content scrapers not sleepls, so )
 
You received tons of traffic to the article in N4G, not google.
Now you will have more traffic NG4 like you ...
 
I think is the authority of the site. NG4 has a lot more authority apparently. Google does that all the time. Think news sites that often "quote" a lot from original content and just spread it around. Is all in the authority
 
News sites having duplicate content is no news, bro. Most ofthe content on them is duplicate, yet since they are news sites, they get a pass. Also, lots of blogs are feeding off news sites' RSS feeds so taht would explain why all of them outrank you - they are all seen as news sites.
 
if an authority site takes your article and paste that in there website even though it is copied they big G will not bother to push the site down since it has more authority that the original article site , This has happend to my web site i have put some article in ezine and some one scraped the article and put in his site an he got ranked over the ezine and the thing is that i did it for link baithing but the guy who took the article did even bother to give a link back, only thing i was able to do was to contact the hosting with DCMA and also i asked the webmaster to give proper credits
 
I totally agree with bobgoe, same has happened with me in the past if it has more authority than original article site , Google will surely push the one with high authority although it's not fair but there are still flaws in Google algorithm
 
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