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  • Getting Out Ranked By Sites with Duplicate & Unrelated Content

    Posted by seohelper on April 9, 2020 at 8:36 pm

    I’m in a niche….*let’s say casinos*. It’s a tough one to rank for but I’m targeting a particular long tail but good volume keyword.

    I have two sites shooting for it and they are both on the bottom of page #1 in Google. My competitor owns 3 sites, are all listed #1, #2 and #3 for that particular keyword.

    I’m thinking he has to have less errors or bugs than me. I run performance reports at webpagetest.org and he has many more problems than me. OK so it’s likely content, right? Here are three amazing things I see about all his sites.

    #1: He copies his content between sites. So he writes an article, copies the title, content, url key, etc on both sites. Word for word copies. It’s duplicate content 100%. You can copy the text from a paragraph in parenthesis and see it appear as both sites in search results. Again I thought Google hated this? What’s the deal?
    #2: Next the niche is let’s say “casinos”, right? He has blog articles about being left handed, with resources to left hand stores. He also has an article about famous CLOWNS. OK so maybe it’s an article about CLOWNS that PLAY THE SLOTS and maybe it’s relevant content? I could see that working. Otherwise this just seems like unrelated content just to increase your content.
    * Plus a lot of his other article content was stolen from ARTICLEBASE articles. I read the articles from the original source and it’s just a copy/paste job and most of his articles don’t even reference the original ARTICLEBASE source he took it from.

    I rank for OTHER keywords, so I know I’m not blacklisted. His domains are older than mine by 3/4 years, that much I can agree helps him. Well 2/3 do (I outrank one), but all my domains are least 10+ years old so we’re not a fly by night setup ourselves.

    All I can think of is he writes an article about CLOWNS, for example, which has 5+ clown external reference links as in the article and one of those links, links back to his site on their own blog? Maybe he’s exchanging links? I thought this was considered farming and Google hated that?

    Unless I’m wrong and Google loves content regardless of it’s form. I just know if I view the sitemap of any other legitimate site in any other niche like “custom t shirts”, I don’t see blog articles on their site about the industrial revolution or dental floss for the heck of cramming in.

    I ran his site through screamingfrogSEO and nowhere does he internally reference these odd articles in other areas.

    hummdog replied 3 years, 11 months ago 1 Member · 1 Reply
  • 1 Reply
  • hummdog

    Guest
    April 10, 2020 at 6:56 am

    I would check his backlinks on ubersuggest or semrush. My highest competitors for the local service biz with a few dozen clients a year have several thousand backlinks. Plus the search term is in their domains. Local seo basically sucks and can be gamed easily