I haven’t really understood nor tried understanding all the intricate details of the Google search algorithm, thus I can only react in amazement at some seemingly strange output in some google search results. Maybe if I take the time to do some really in-depth research on this matter, I might not be so surprised. One search I did recently returned the following:
As you can see, I did a search on the term “domain names + unnecessary words”. I got interested in the first two search returns. I guess everyone gets interested in the first two or three items but this one is different in that the snippets of both are exactly the same. The SEOQuake data underneath each one says the first one has no PR rank while the second (and the third and fourth) has PR3. A closer look also revealed that a large part of the contents (including the snippet) of the former was copied from the latter (although the duplication was given due credit). The rest of the former’s page content are also copied from other sites. In other words, the first site, which ranks first in this particular serp, is a page full of content copied word for word from other sites. And it ranked higher than the original site from which it copied its contents.
As shown in the above image, the first site’s page, with duplicate contents, outranked others with aged domains, too. So far, this and the above-mentioned premises go against what (little) I’ve learned so far in the seo game.
Does this show that duplicate contents are okay with google? Can we just make a blog and output endless posts made up of material copied from other sites and still rank high? Interestingly, Yahoo ranked the original content source’s page at number 3 and the duplicate page at number 31, also reflecting the same snippets in their result page. Yahoo seems to be the better search engine in this case. But then again, it’s google we lowly webmasters have to contend with because it’s the leading search engine at this time.
Personally, this tells me that I have yet to learn a lot, at least with respect to google, about seo. Of course, there’s always the option of taking the easy way. That is, by getting a professional seo agency to do all the work e.g. S.E.O. Co. which is a professional SEO agency based in blah blah blah.
Some veterans, by the way, seems to imply that Google doesn’t care about copyright and may even try to dodge the issue by scaring you away if you pursue the matter, as discussed in this post.
What do you think?