Content Penalties and Confusions -Duplicate vs. Low Quality vs. Farming

There are lots of confusions behind content penalties. If our site get penalized due to content then it’s difficult to identify that which penalty hit our website. I saw many webmasters even doesn’t know that what kind of content penalties can be applied to a website. If their sites get penalized because of content they just think it’s a duplicate content penalty. First of all I would like to confirm you that a site can get penalized by three kinds of content penalties –

1. Duplicate Content
2. Low Quality, Poor or Thin Content
3. Content Farming

Duplicate Content Penalties and Effects

Most of the webmasters and Bloggers work harder to avoid any kind of penalties to their sites held by major search engines and duplicate content penalty is one of them. A site may get hit and penalize by duplicate content penalty due to two reasons. One, if you are copying content from other websites and republishing it on your own site. Secondly, if someone else is copying your content to publish it on his/ her website. According to Google they are able to differentiate original and duplicate content. But I have seen many case studies on famous and high authority blogs proving Google wrong on the above statement. Even I have my own worst experience on duplicate penalty where Google Penalize me for original content and the guy who copied me still running his site. I’ll definitely share this experience in my coming articles.

Ways Google Handling Duplicate Content (Matt Cutts -Head Google Search Spam)

Confusion

To prove this we can take an example of world’s biggest article directory Goarticles. Before we continue have a look on the numbers.

Site Name                           -Goarticles.com

Google PR                           – 6

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Alexa Rank                         -2600

Domain Authority           -85/100

Page Authority                 -87/100

Well, I think the numbers are quite impressive. If you don’t have any experience with this site then let me explain what they are doing.

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1. They are accepting 1000s of articles everyday and publishing them on their site without checking the content originality. They have instant publishing system which means your content is not require any editorial view.
2. They are continuously publishing articles without checking any grammatical, verbs, voice or style errors.
3. They have millions of duplicate and low quality articles available on their site. you can also check link building strategies to avoid suggested by Delhi Courses.

After all the above errors, whenever we publish any article to this site, Google crawl and index it within 15 to 30 minutes. Then what Google meant with content penalties.

how to improve search queries in Google Webmaster Tool

Low, thin and poor Quality Content Penalties

Low or thin quality content means an article has a few words to explain the title. According to major search engines a subject could be explain with at-least 450-500 words. If you are continuously writing short articles then your site may get affected with low or thin quality content penalties.

Poor Quality content means an article is full of grammatical errors. It’s hard to understand that article due to grammar errors.

Also see Google Humming Bird Update

Confusion

I have a list of more than 20 blogs producing very-very poor quality and thin content and having Google page rank 1 or above and alexa rank below 50000. I’m not sharing that blog names here because I feel it’s not good and if you are a blogger then I think you are very much aware of this. What these guys are doing is just writing articles and commenting on other blogs and their own blogs are doing well from a long time. So what does Google meant by Poor-Thin or low quality content penalty. you can learn more about content penalties in our Digital Marketing Course.

Penalties Due to Content Farming

Content farming means publishing 100s of poor quality articles on a site or blog every day. Content farming is mostly done by seo companies. What they did is just write an article and publish it on 100s of article directories at the same time to get backlinks.

Confusion and My Experience

Generally I don’t use the above mentioned technique but to check it out I use it on two of my client’s websites. These websites are related to short-term courses. I write few articles and publish them on Goarticles and articlebase kind of websites and after that I create some bookmarks for them. I did the same for a month and both of the sites comes in top ten in serp’s. I am doing the same from last one and a half-year even more than that and these sites are really doing well in SERP’s with my targeted keywords.

So after all of the above points do you think Google or any other major search engine is really able to identify actual content spam?  please share your experiences with me in comments.