Comments on: Good Evening And Welcome To… Whats My Google Penalty!!

By: Google Penalty For Hidden Text - Diagnosed and Cured! » UK Affiliate Marketing Blog - Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Thu, 14 May 2009 09:24:35 +0000

[...] So on March 30th I wrote a post complaining that once again I’d fallen victim to the whims of dear old Google and had been handed a right old royal slapping on my new mens undies site. Refresh your memory here if you need to. [...]

By: Kirsty

Kirsty — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:36:40 +0000

Yes you are right that Google does tend to “select” content where duplication exists, but there is a limit to the G-meister’s toleration of it on a site. If content is repeated multiple times on multiple pages it will tend to trip some kind of filter. Also, I think that if your site has over a certain percentage of duplicate content you’ll find yourself up poop creek with the SERPS. I’ve seen this on 3 separate sites now, 2 of my own and one owned by a friend.

Incidentally, the site is now recovering after I removed the plugin. Phew!!!!!!

By: Blogercise

Blogercise — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:59:29 +0000

I’ve used the feature article plugin before. You can set the preview length iirc in the admin page. I set it to allow 2 lines of text and then I always make sure those opening lines are attention grabbing!

Matt “Google spam king” Cutts once blogged on duplicate content, he stated that you won’t be penalised as such, rather that the posted copy won’t rank and Google is very good at spotting which one came first. Google will always rank one of the pages, it just doesn’t want to bother with both.

The problem with duplicate pages is that often your links get split between them so neither builds up enough page rank between them.

This seems to be an often misunderstood topic but Google have shared lots of info on this. Could it be that other sites are just better optimised and better linked than yours? It’s competitive out there!

Good luck with getting back in the rankings!

By: john

john — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:42:43 +0000

hi kirsty, long time listener, first time caller, as they say.

a bit off topic, but the penalty thing made me think – with that and the market beacoming more crowded each day, can you still get decent click ( let’s say under a dollar) for decent products?

this is also a question for anybody else, but i am wondering how are people doing and are they still getting 0.5 to 1$ clicks on anything, as nitch as it would be.

By: Kirsty

Kirsty — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:53:43 +0000

@ Edward… Ummm… no. Not having meta tags will have no effect on whether or not Google thinks you have all the same content on your pages and would certainly never trigger a penalty. OK not having a description tag is not idea, but if you look at my sites in the SERPS you’ll see I’ve managed to get all pages to have very interesting, unique descriptions without use of the meta tag.

Also the other page you identified is the shop section and just isn’t meant to attract traffic of its own. The site is also using nofollow and noindex in the manner you’ve suggested via a meta robots plugin.

@Sherry – it’s very confusing, isn’t it? If you’d like me to take a bit of a look at it for you do drop me a line. Sometimes a second pair of eyes can be very useful!

By: Sherry

Sherry — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:38:16 +0000

I think its just a google thing with new sites you cant avoid. One of my sites has over 10 000 inlinks from some really good quality related sites and doesnt appear in serps.

I am in the fashion niche too so lots of other blogs link naturally to my site and since the 3rd of Dec I have been in the sandbox. Its come back out for a few days and goes back in again. Domain was new registered end of oct

I checked on google webmaster forums and they doesnt seem to be any problem with my site and I also did most of the things you have done. I had over 3000 indexed pages but it included plugins and all, and I removed those more than a month and now 300 post show BUT still no joy

I have resubmitted site in webmaster but still no lucky, so i understand how it feels but sometimes you just need to sit tights

During my quest I stumbled on this post http://econsultancy.com/blog/3244-econsultancy-site-migration-and-seo-impact-the-story-so-far thats a fairly big site and they redirected to a new domain but you will see the problems they had…worthy a read

By: Edwardboyce

Edwardboyce — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:20:59 +0000

Hey Kirsty,

Looking at your site, there is one major issue that 2 seconds of snooping at your code reveals, and that is missing description header tags on all your pages. This is why in google it appears like you have the same content on all pages and is likely to be causing some issues.

The site also needs to use nofollow and noindex correctly – for instance only allowing google to reach your posts via the cateogry, so not allowing the indexing of tags / date / archives this can be achieved.

You will also see issues on pages like http://www.blokesundies.co.uk/shop/boxers.php where only the title is entered and no description / unique content.

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:46:32 +0000

I do understand you point of view.

The best thing you can do in the short term is to build some links into your site, you will then eaily out rank the people who have copied your content.

This will help give you some ideas for building links – http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml

By: Grant

Grant — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:20:47 +0000

Do you have a particular wordpress theme you use for your sites or vary as you go?

By: Grockle

Grockle — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:54:18 +0000

Don’t know if it makes any difference but your sitemap gives 4 identical pages of links.

Thanks for putting your hassles up, it certainly helps others try to get things right.