Yes, it’s finally here, the “My Site Sucks” Penalty. Google has taken to penalizing sites that just suck. It seems that their guidelines should now include “Your site must have some kind of value to someone”, in order to get listed without a penalty.
In all seriousness, Google seems to be taking duplicate content much more seriously and penalizing a large number of Web sites. See Google’s Guidelines – Quality Guidelines:
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
You might have already heard of the -30 penalty or the dreaded -90 penalty. You might have even worked with a Web site effected by this penalty. Just search for the “-30 Google penalty”on Google, and you’ll find many forum messages on the subject. But now it seems that getting penalized is becoming an issue of useful content rather than valid SEO design and meeting Google’s quality guidelines.
If you look up the word “substantially” in the dictionary, you’ll see:
Sub·stan·tial·ly: adv. In a substantial manner; in substance; essentially.
The word “substantially” used with the words “duplicate content”, essentially gives Google the right to penalize just about any Web site that contains similar content to another. That is, your Web site must now contain substance, or content of value.
Let’s take a simple book store Web site for an example. Even though the book store Web site may sell rare and collectible books to people who are actually interested in these rare books, Google may find that the Web site has “essentially” the same content as Amazon.com, who is huge online book seller. Google may view this Web site as one without any significant substance and penalize it.
So, what can the bookseller do, you might ask? Could the book seller write unique content? Not really. Writing unique content would not necessarily improve the situation. The book seller is amongst thousands of book selling Web sites. The book seller’s Web site would still lack substance.
If the book seller made their own organization and became a group of rare book sellers collaborating together in order to promote their stores, then Google might see the added substance and value. As an organization’s Web site, it has now proven to have significant substance. It’s no longer just about selling books, even though that may be it’s main purpose. It also provides a community portal for the book sellers, which is valuable not only for the buyers, but for the sellers as well.
The point I’m trying to make is that Google is trying to list Web sites of value; ones that we would like to visit. Take a good look at your Web site. Is it one of substance?
Jeff Walters
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