Search engine myths exposed

Myth #2:Google Will Not Rank Duplicate Content If you’re worried that using duplicate content is going to somehow get your site penalized, deindexed, or otherwise make your site fall out

Jonathan Leger

www.SearchEngineMythsExposed.com

Table of Contents

Why I wrote this report 3

Myth #1: Google Knows All and Sees All 5

Myth #2: Google Will Not Rank Duplicate Content 6

Myth #3: You Must Get Links From Related Subject Sites to Rank 15

Myth #4: Your Site Must Focus On One Subject To Rank 20

Myth #5: High PageRank Means Good Rankings 24

Myth #6: To Maintain Good Rankings, You Must Add New Content 31

Myth #7: The Biggest Myth: Ranking in Google is Hard 34

A Case Study On Ranking in Google 41

The Easiest Way To Rank In Google 47

Earn $2,525 by giving away this report! 48

About the Author 49

Why I wrote this report

I’m going to keep each section of this report as short as possible If you’re like me, you’re busy, and you don’t want to spend the next week trying to suffer through 300 pages of e-bloat in the hopes that you get a few nuggets of wisdom that you can really use This report is only as large as it is because of all the screenshots from Google, Yahoo and other sites I’ve included so you can see the facts for yourself

With that in mind, feel free to skip this section

However, if you’ve been struggling to rank in Google, reading the next few paragraphs will help you to see that I was in your shoes once, too That I got frustrated too,

before finally seeing the light and cutting through all of the baloney

I wrote this report because I used to think that ranking in Google was hard I thought

it was hard because I was listening to all the “gurus” who talked about ridiculous things like meta tags, keyword density and PageRank I listened to them, used the methods they were hawking, and failed miserably

So I turned instead to the search engine optimization (SEO) forums to see if what they had to say was any better than the “gurus” who had taken my money I read the posts

of the “forum gods” that everybody bowed to, listening and trying to replicate their methods for ranking, only to meet with more failure

In desperation I took the few things that I had found to be true and worked on them, ignoring all of the conventional “wisdom” that is still being spread all over the web about how to rank in Google No matter how much the nay-sayers protested, if I saw it was working I kept at it

And you know what? Only then did I start seeing real results

I was floored Had the “gurus” been lying on purpose to keep me from ranking? Were the “forum gods” doing the same, trying to stifle competition by spreading false

information? The conspiracy-theories going through my head didn’t last long, because I had an epiphany about what was going on

The “gurus” and SEO “forum gods” were repeating what they had heard, not what they themselves were doing How do I know this? Because none of the

bogus advice was backed up with facts, proofs and examples It was just empty words promising the world if you “did this” or “did that.” The nay-sayers were doing the opposite, saying “this” or “that” wouldn’t work because they didn’t think it would, not because they could prove that it wasn’t working for themselves or others

The “forum gods” could be forgiven, since they were just hanging out with nothing better to do then spread their “wisdom” (I often wondered if any of them had jobs, or were still living at home with their parents They seemed to have an awful lot of time

to post on forums.)

The “gurus”, however, were more reprehensible They were selling bogus

information without checking it out first If they had done the research ahead of time, then they would have quickly seen that it was false Apparently they were so

busy taking peoples’ money and cashing their checks that they didn’t have time to actually verify the methods they were hawking

Now, much of what the “gurus” are selling perhaps used to be true, before Google came on the scene and obliterated the competition Things have changed dramatically, and yet the information being hawked is almost exactly the same

That’s why I decided to write this report It’s time to dispel the myths, get out of the

90’s and start proving the facts that work now It’s time for you to stop paying the

“gurus” that aren’t proving that their methods work.

Okay, that’s enough of that Now let’s get into it

Myth #1:

Google Knows All and Sees All

This myth really burns me up Try this: post anything that goes against conventional Google-ranking wisdom to an SEO forum (no matter how successful you’ve been with it) and watch dozens or hundreds of people flail you about how wrong you are and how Google ‘surely knows how to negate that method.’

Will they offer proof of their nay-saying? No They just have blind faith in Google’s

ability to know all and see all

Blind faith is the only phrase I can use for this thinking, because it’s not based on reason or proof The conventional SEO wisdom teaches simply that Google is a deity which knows all and sees all

But what is Google, really? Google is an algorithm And who created the algorithm? People created Google’s algorithm (Sorry nay-sayers, Google was not handed the

algorithm from the Divine.)

Yes, people wrote Google’s algorithm Are people perfect? No Then can Google’s algorithm be perfect? No Do people know all and see all? No Then can Google’s

algorithm know all and see all? No!

In fact, it never ceases to amaze me what Google doesn’t see One forum that seems

to be more honest than the rest is WebMasterWorld.com I think it attracts a higher caliber of posters because it doesn’t allow signatures The people there are actually there to share information, and not try to pitch or sell you on something

WMW has a forum dedicated to Google’s search engine, and I’ve been reading through

it for a couple of years now It never ceases to amaze me how many complaints I read about how badly Google is performing in a variety of sectors and keywords How the sites ranking in the top 10 are all spam or Made For Adsense (MFA) sites These

posters complain that they continually notify Google of the problem, and yet the sites remain in their top-ranking positions

Now does that sound like the work of a Deity? It doesn’t, does it It sounds (*gasp* dare I say it?) like the work of people

Yes, Myth #1, that Google knows all and sees all, is undeniably false.

So stop being afraid of Google Now let’s get into a few specific myths surrounding how Google responds to a variety of methods and tactics, starting with Duplicate

Content

Myth #2:

Google Will Not Rank Duplicate Content

If you’re worried that using duplicate content is going to somehow get your site

penalized, deindexed, or otherwise make your site fall out of favor with Google, stop worrying:

smx.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/duplicate-content-summit-at-The above post is from Google’s official blog Notice the second bulleted point,

underlined in red Google says quite plainly that duplicate content won’t hurt your site

But is it possible for duplicate content to rank well? Absolutely Let’s talk about that.

Click this link and take a look at all of the duplicate content that appears in Google’s results:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Get+Motivated+to+Create+New+AdSense+Content%22&btnG=Search

That link will search Google for the title (in quotes) of a blog post that I wrote and later submitted to EzineArticles.com quite some time ago There are currently 315 copies of the article published in Google:

Now, if Google filters duplicate content, why is it that 315 results are shown, and not just one? Ever think about that?

You might say, “Yeah, but you put the title in quotes That makes a difference.”

Okay, here’s the link to the title without quotes:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Get+Motivated+to+Create+New+AdSense+Content&btnG=Search

The top 10 results are very similar, with or without quotes!

What does that mean? It means that Google is not filtering the duplicates!

“That’s because it’s such a long query,” you say? Then let’s shorten it Let’s search Google only for “Motivated to Create Content”:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Motivated+to+Create+Content&btnG=Search

Oh look! The top 2 results are still duplicate copies of my article!

Or how about “New AdSense Content” (with quotes)?

As of right now, six of the top 10 results are still for duplicate copies of my article (including the number two spot, shown above)

What does all of this mean? It means that Google will rank a duplicate copy of an article After all, that article originally appeared on my blog, and yet my blog post is not in the top 10 for any of the search queries I've shown!

Does that mean that you can just run out and publish thousands of private label rights (PLR) articles, or articles from free article sites and get a flood of traffic from Google?

No, that’s not what it means

Why not? In Google’s own blog post shown at the beginning of this section, Google’s representative said that “Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job

of picking a version of your content to show.”

Let’s break this statement down into its two parts:

1 Google wants to serve up unique results.

It’s Google’s goal to only show one copy of any particular article or page in the search results for a given query Having ten duplicate results of the same article for a query doesn’t help the person performing the search nearly as much as having ten unique articles for the searcher to choose from

In another blog post Google makes this reason very clear:

“Our users typically want to see a diverse cross-section of unique content

when they do searches In contrast, they're understandably annoyed

when they see substantially the same content within a set of search

results.”

content.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-That leads us to the second part of Google’s own statement:

2 [Google] does a great job of picking a version of your content to show.

Ah, yes Google picks a version of the duplicate content to display What do they base that selection on?

Primarily two things: links to the page and the title tag

You see, when you search for a set of keywords (in this case an article title), Google will first check to see if any pages in their index have links aiming at it containing the search query

So when you search for “Get Motivated to Create New AdSense Content”, Google will first check the links going into the pages to see if they contain that exact phrase (or important parts of it)

Now, almost no pages are going to have many (if any) links with that really long phrase

in the anchor text So Google then has to default to looking for pages whose title alone matches the query

That’s why all of the duplicates show up in the results when you search for “Get

Motivated to Create New AdSense Content” – Google is relying on the title tag to find matching results due to a lack of related links

However, the shorter our query gets, the more pages Google will find whose in-bound links do match the search query Now Google’s hands are untied: it can start showing other results, and pick only the “best” version of the duplicate content to display And what determines what the “best” version is? The links aimed at the page, of course!

Did you notice that the same result was #1 for “Motivated to Create Content” and #2 for “New AdSense Content” in Google? That’s because it actually had some links aimed

at it from other sites that included the keywords

(I’ll be using Yahoo to demonstrate link quantity, since Google’s link: command shows very, very few of the links actually aimed at a page in order to prevent – I believe – precisely this kind of analysis.)

Since the competition isn’t fierce for the keywords I used, it only took 20 links for this piece of duplicate content to get ranked My point is, though, that it still ranked It was not filtered, despite being a duplicate copy of an article that was not published on that site before any other

That’s important, too, so let me repeat it:

Google does not always rank the site that originally published the article Google shows the page that has the most linking power for the query.

Like I said before, the article I’m using as an example was published first on my own blog, and then submitted to EzineArticles.com My blog isn’t anywhere in the top ten for any of the queries shown here

Why not? Because I wrote the blog post for my email list I wrote it, emailed my list about it, and that was it I didn’t optimize my page at all No optimization means no ranking!

“But maybe your blog post just wasn’t indexed first?” you say

Let’s think about that Maybe it wasn’t indexed first But EzineArticles.com’s copy was indexed overnight after being published, and yet EzineArticles’ copy of the article does not rank #1! Why not?

It’s indexed in Yahoo:

But Yahoo says there aren’t any links aimed at it:

It doesn’t matter if the page was published first on EzineArticles if there aren’t any links aimed at that page That’s another pile of baloney myth that is spread all over the web The “gurus” claim that the page indexed first wins That’s not true at all (as demonstrated here) The page with the most links wins!

While not wanting to come right out and say it, Google gives a strong hint that this is true in a blog post about duplicate content:

“Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make

sure they include a link back to the original article on each

syndicated article Even with that, note that we'll always show the

(unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given

search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer.” (emphasis

mine)

content.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-Why would Google want you to make sure a link back to the original article is included

in the syndicated copy? Quite obviously this helps to ensure that there are more links

to the original article, helping it to rank better than the duplicates

In another post from that same blog, Google also makes it clear that your original article may not be the one to rank:

“Q: I've syndicated my content to many affiliates and now some of those

sites are ranking for this content rather than my site What can I do?

If you've freely distributed your content, you may need to enhance and

expand the content on your site to make it unique.”

smx.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/duplicate-content-summit-at-The bottom line is: if you want duplicate content to rank, you need to get links

containing the search keywords you want to rank for aimed at your copy of the article The more competition there is, the harder it is to rank a duplicate page (because remember, Google wants to show 100% unique results if it can)

Your copy has to be the copy with the most relevant links in order to rank for a given search query

That’s a compelling reason to have unique content: the competition for ranking is less fierce Think about it: If you have a page of unique content, and your page is just a little less optimized than another unique page optimized for the same keywords, your page may rank #2, just under the better-optimized page at #1 That’s still great!

However, if you have a page of duplicate content, and your page is just a little less optimized than another page of duplicate content for the same keywords, the better-optimized page will rank well, but your page won’t be in Google’s results at all for those keywords That’s because Google selects the best duplicate page to rank for a given query, and leaves the others out completely unless there’s just not anything else unique

to display that matches the query

All that said, just because it’s harder to rank duplicate content does not mean Google

won’t do it They make it clear on their own blog that this can and will happen if the original article is not well optimized but a duplicate copy is

Myth #2, that Google will not rank duplicate content, is undeniably false.

Myth #3:

You

Must Get Links From Related Subject Sites to Rank

I’m more inclined to be understanding of people who believe that this myth is true than most of the other myths, simply because it does seem like it would be true It seems like Google’s algorithm would be advanced enough to give more value to links from pages that are related to the subject matter of your own page

Does Google do this? Does its algorithm give these related-subject links (known in the SEO world as “themed links”) more value?

I’ll be honest: I don’t know if themed links are more valuable to Google.

The reason I don’t know is because it is so difficult to get themed links for niche sites, and I deal almost exclusively with niche sites Finding hundreds of places where you can get a one-way link for a bonsai tree or deep sea fishing site is no easy task!

Even if you can find enough potential places to get a link in niche subject areas, there’s

no guarantee that the webmasters are willing to sell (or trade) links with you Besides,

I don’t trade links, because my research shows that reciprocal linking just doesn’t have

a lot of link power with Google anymore One-way links help you out in Google much more (as do links that appear to be one-way – more on that later)

Because of this problem, I am forced to get links from sites that have little or nothing to

do with the subject matter of my own niche sites But you know what?

Despite the fact that links to my sites are completely off-theme, my sites still rank wonderfully well in Google!

I’ll be giving you an example of one of my own sites shortly, but first I’m going to show you a site that ranks really well for very competitive keywords that does not rely on themed links for its ranking in Google

The site is submitexpress.com As of today, January 9, 2008, SubmitExpress ranks #4

in Google for the phrase “search engine optimization.” Talk about a competitive set of keywords! All of the top SEO gurus are working hard to rank well for that phrase That’s a real feather in the cap for the guys who do SEO for a living

Here’s a screenshot of the current Google rankings:

SubmitExpress has maintained a great ranking for those keywords for at least the past

6 months, because I wrote a blog post related to this subject on June 27, and

submitexpress.com was #3 back then

(Boy, did the nay-sayers have a field day with that post! Of course, not a single one of them proved me wrong My favorite one is from a well-known SEO group that started off their “rebuttal” with the fact that there are exceptions to every rule My whole point

is that if the “rule” has such huge, glaring, undeniable “exceptions”, it’s no rule at

all!

Okay, moving on…)

So what kind of pages are linking to submitexpress.com? Are they related to SEO, or even general webmaster topics? Very few of them are!

To demonstrate this to you, I wrote a script that extracts the primary keywords in the page titles of the 1,000 backlinks reported by Yahoo I wanted to see just how many of the first 1,000 links reported actually had anything to do with search engine

optimization Here’s a list of the top keywords appearing in the page titles, along with the number of times the keywords appeared in the linking page titles

real estate => 81

county real => 25

search engine => 11

oregon real estate => 8

beach real estate => 8

Yes, 23 of the 190 occurances shown here do have something to do with search

engines or web sites

“That’s 12%,” you say? Not quite This list is not exhaustive The entire list consists of

750 keyword occurrences (most of which are completely unrelated) That means that only 3% of the links to submitexpress.com (at least in the 1,000 samples provided by Yahoo) actually come from pages that have anything to do with search engines or web sites

That leaves 97% that come from completely off-theme pages (as you can see from the list above) There’s no reason to believe that the rest of this site’s links don’t fall into a similar pattern

That means that submitexpress.com has achieved the vast majority of its link power, the link power that has it ranked #4 for an incredibly competitive set of keywords, from

off-theme links.

Shocking? Not to me! My sites have been ranking from off-theme links for a long time.

Now that you can see that sites can rank really well for really competitive keywords with off-theme links, let me show you an example that’s a bit more down to earth This

is an example of one of my own sites, ArticleBuilder.net Here’s a snapshot of its

current Google ranking for the phrase “free web content”:

It’s currently #5, but it’s ranking ranges from #3 to #7 (Google shifts things up a bit from time to time) It’s always well positioned on page one, though

Pay a visit to Yahoo’s site explorer to see how completely off-theme the links are to

this site:

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.articlebuilder.net&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=u

The pages linking to it range in subject matter from building custom furniture to lasik eye surgery to alcoholism treatment and so forth Virtually none of the pages have anything to do with “free web content.”

And yet my site has been enjoying page one ranking (and traffic) for close to a year now

A kind of funny proof that links don’t have to be on-theme can be seen in Google’s results for the phrase “click here”:

Seriously, do you think that the links aimed at these sites are from pages or sites related to “click here”? Or is it just that the links contain the phrase “click here.” The answer is obvious

Need I say more?

Myth #3, that you must get “themed links” to rank well, is undeniably false.

Myth #4:

Your Site Must Focus On One Subject To Rank

Accepted SEO “wisdom” states that your site needs to contain information that is all related to each other in order to rank well Having a “themed site”, as they call it, is the only way to win Google’s love This is pure mythology Let me give you an

example:

I have a blog (hotnewsitems.blogspot.com) that has an archive page which ranks #8 for the phrase “zoon mp3 reviews”

In case you aren’t aware, Zoon is a brand of mp3 player Is that blog about mp3

players, or music, or even electronics in general? No, it’s a general news blog that was part of a case study I was doing

In fact, there’s only one post on the site that has anything to do with mp3 players, and that’s the post that is generating the ranking in Google!

So how is it that my blog ranks so well for that query? Links, of course!

The blog is too new for the backlinks to be showing in Yahoo!, so I can’t give you a screenshot of the links here I can tell you, though, that I submitted that post to about

70 social bookmarking sites, so it has quite a few links aimed at it (from completely theme sites, too, by the way)

off-Does your site have to be all on the same theme to rank well in Google? My blog

ranking for an mp3-player set of keywords sure screams No!

Let me give you another great example that proves this notion of themed content to be complete mythology

Did you know that the US Social Security Administration has a section of its site devoted

to popular baby names? It does!

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/

According to Google, ssa.gov has about 90 pages devoted to the topic of baby names:

What percentage of the SSA’s total content is that? Well, according to Google, ssa.gov

is made up of about 20,000 pages:

That means that less than 1/2 of 1% of the pages of the SSA’s site are devoted to baby names If you believed conventional SEO “wisdom”, that means that there’s no way the SSA’s baby names section could rank well for the phrase “baby names” – after all, those pages are completely unrelated to the theme of the rest of the site.

I’m afraid Google disagrees:

With more than 12 million competing pages, this government web site with only a tiny fraction of its pages devoted to the topic of “baby names” is ranking #4 in Google for the keywords.

Need I say more?

Myth #4, that your site must focus on one subject, is undeniably false.

Myth #5:

High PageRank Means Good Rankings

In case you’re not familiar with PageRank, it’s merely a number from 0 to 10 that

indicates the link popularity of a page in Google’s index So, basically, the more links a page has, the higher its PageRank will be It’s not quite that simple, since the

PageRank of the linking pages also effects the PageRank of the linked page (that is, one page can “pass” PageRank to another) I’ve seen the formula Google uses to calculate PageRank, and it’s pretty daunting Fortunately, it’s also unimportant

PageRank is the currency of link buyers and sellers, to be sure The higher the

PageRank of a page, the more it will cost to buy a link there – period People pay a

premium for PageRank because of the ever-present myth that having a high PageRank

will help your site rank better Untold millions of dollars are wasted on purchasing links

at exorbitant prices because the pages where the links will appear have a high

PageRank value

The reason why this myth persists is that it appears to be true Many top ranking sites

do have a high PageRank, and therefore the connection is often made that their ranking

is because of their PageRank

To demonstrate this, I ran 500 very competitive keywords through Google and checked the PageRank of each of the top 10 ranking sites for each set of keywords

Here's the average PageRank for the top 10 ranking sites across the board:

Now, just looking at the averages, you might say, "wow, I guess high PageRank sites

do rank better!" And you wouldn't be entirely wrong for saying that Yes, overall, sites with higher PageRank are ranking better in Google

But the question is: is it the PageRank that's causing the high ranking, or is it

something else?