Help me with a serious Google problem!

[moredial]

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I wonder if they're only referring to 100% duplicates though?

A lot has been written about what a duplicate is. 75% seems to be an agreed figure but could be as wrong as any other.

The duplicate the blog is actually talking about - just been reading - is where you have page.html. Your site does not have to be dynamic for page.html?something to give the same content as page.html. Add in mod-rewrite and session IDs and you can have as many URLs as possibilities, all with the same content.

What G is counting is the URL in the inbound link as that is what is being indexed. Using the 301 redirect to point all these different ? urls to just the one url on your site means that you are in control of which url receives the PR.

The theory looks wonderful.

It all falls apart when the duplicate is over different domains. Now the canonical url is a lottery. Until very recently, using base href in the head was able to protect pages that were cached via proxy so that internal links still pointed to the originating domain. The proxies I was looking at last night had replaced the base href with their own domain and dynamic url for the site being cloned so all the proxied site is getting sucked into the duplicate clone penatly.

Using absolute links is even worse, or no help at all. On one proxied home page, I clicked on a few links to external sites and they all got sucked into the proxy. This is why you have to block the proxy from getting access to your site.

When it is just the innocent who is copying part of your text, the 'cloned extract' rule comes into play. If the text which has been duplicated just happens to be your nicely optimised text with all your key phrases then this text is also going to do well on the duplicate page. The fluff on the duplicate page and the fluff on the original page are about equal, and the higher PR page wins the battle.
This is why the pseudo directories which use extracts from the SERPs do so well while your nice new site disappears until you start to play the relevant link building game to give you a higher PR.

And all this without a single mention of cloaking.

The thing I like about the other search engines is that they are usually very good at discovering who is the originator of the text; which is why I use them for research and get the whole story in the top results rather than just a few paragraphs that leave me having to make another search for the rest of the article.

This is turning into a lesson in black hat seo, or, how to discover if your drop in ranking has been caused by what you did or a black hat attack.

[moredial]

That's the position I'm in now and it means I can now party in Hong Kong instead of Hartlepool. With more volume of traffic, it's more sales.

I've had months when Google doesn't promote my site at any high level and all I can see is Yahoo and MSN results in the log files.

And it's depressing as Yahoo only seem to spider pages once a month at best.

For Yahoo you need some good and static landing pages. Anything below root tends to be ignored.

I have just looked at a site where I updated all 200+ pages at the beginning of the month. Yahoo, entireweb, ask and MSN had visited most pages by the 4th. Looks like those are also the source of most of my traffic. Googlebot and the scrapper bots only started hitting me on the 8th.

I just hope it does not take MSN 3 months to add the new content to the cache.

[jess1]

moredial:

One client had better conversion on Yahoo and MSN visitors than their adwords conversion -

Yeah...it would seem a lot are very google visioned and forget that this may not be their target SE for best conversions, a rather good point you made there :0)

[befuddle]

Google.co.uk web search is now displaying Sitelinks for BedStar on the brand search. The additional links are automatic and are present to "help users navigate the site."

So the merchant may now benefit from additional sales as the search engine has picked out "Divan beds" and "metal beds".

[moredial]

Bedstar are not out of the woods yet.

A search on allintitle:"Online Beds Superstore - Mattresses, Leather Beds, Metal, Wooden, Bunk Beds, Memory Foam" still has webgains in the top spot with the affiliate URL in both the .com and .co.uk versions of the SERPs. At least affiliatewindow seems to be out of the SERPs now so at least things are going in the correct direction.

For 'bedstar' .com is still with the webgains affiliate URL at #1

Who is stupid sleepingsolutions.net/.me.uk/.co.uk who is bidding on bedstar? - and not even offering bedstar on their landing page.

[drivetowin]

Since sleepingsolutions are one of bedstar's competitors I think it's a bit unlikely they would offer bedstar on their landing page...

[moredial]

Since sleepingsolutions are one of bedstar's competitors I think it's a bit unlikely they would offer bedstar on their landing page...

But, still stupid to bid on something that will get lots of clicks and no sales.

[drivetowin]

A bit unethical maybe to bid on your competitors brand name, but not stupid - someone looking for bedstar is probably looking to buy a bed, sleeping solutions sell beds, so someone looking for a bed who was originally looking for bedstar might well buy a bed from sleeping solutions instead.

[purple]

the site I saw in the PPC listings looked like an affiliate landing page that went to the other merchant.

[Brendon]

Looks like Matt chipped in, but propagation isn't complete. Bedstar should be back to "normal" in a few days, but guys, that was a warning shot across your bows. Relying on Google to manually tweak your results really isn't a viable long-term SEO plan.

You should have a fairly serious word with your SEO outfit about how this happened. I know nothing about the division of labour here, and who's responsible for doing what, but you need to step up your efforts one way or another, or it'll keep on happening. Whatever it takes, bite the bullet and DO IT! It'll be worth it in the long run

[kier]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to give you a quick update on this situation. The SERPS have now returned to normal and the merchant will be honouring all transactions during the period affected. Once again, a big thank you to everyone who contributed their opinion and advice on this.