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Duplicate Content & NoFollows; Google’s Mythos

Gregger asked 3 years ago
It seems like every day I hear someone making a big fuss about duplicate content or no follow links. There are of course a few SEOs that tested these things themselves years ago and have never believed in them. Now it is pretty obvious that neither of these works the way people wanted/feared them to. So what other Google myths are there?

I’m thinking:
-speed of link acquisition penalties
you can get as many links as fast as you want with no penalty, the thing is, if you’re getting thousands of links quickly, they are probably just crappy links and so that is why it doesn’t help you

-pr bleed
link out as much as you want, you can’t keep the pr by only having internal links

-page load time:
I know some hot consumer sites that take 30 seconds to load and have a loading bar, but they rank well and make money

-penalties for affiliate links
it is much more likely that affiliate sites have a harder time ranking because of lack of unique and new content than the links involved, heck, look at poker listings, they are the biggest affiliate around, but they have tons of content

14 Answers
Gregger answered 3 years ago
I totally agree Scott, there is no point in competing with ourselves by creating duplicate content on our own site, it dilutes link equity, user focus and our time. I know a lot of people that will freak out about having things like manufacturer descriptions on review sites or even publishing new stories. I don’t think there is much harm in either of those.

Obviously it would be better to rewrite it and dense up the keywords, but if I were say scraping 1,000 product descriptions, I would much rather throw them up straight from the manufacturer and then slowly work through them adding keywords later.

helpmepokerdragon answered 3 years ago
what about submiting to directories?
any reason why we should submit different articles to the directories, even if we want to use the same keywords?
how much equal articles is too much?

Gregger answered 3 years ago
You don’t want to submit anything that you have on your site to an article directory. They will most likely outrank you for those keywords and you will get filtered. A good strategy is to use your best content for your site and create other content for article directories that specifically targets keywords and links to relevant pages on your site.

As far as submitting the same article to different directories, they don’t like that and it isn’t really that great for you. Its not that difficult to make a few changes to the article’s sentence structure and make it unique. There are even some programs that help, just make sure to always proof read.

scottpolk answered 3 years ago
When you submit an article to multiple directories thinking you will be getting lots of link equity .. you are misinformed … links that reside in duplicate content is seriously diminished. Google will give much more weight to the first article it indexes and the rest are a waste of time. If you want to do article submissions for links, then write unique articles and submit them .. its worth the effort – vary your anchor text and landing pages as well.