Positive Real Estate Professionals

One of the great things about Positive Real Estate Professionals is all the functionality that can be incorporated into your PREP website; if you would like to view some of the general functionality geared toward making your site more visitor friendly, simply visit the Test Account. Keep in mind that the general functionality is by no means exhaustive nor does it include SEO tweaks. Much of the work done to make your PREP site more friendly to the various search engines and visitors is done behind the scenes.

This brings me to one of the main points of this post. The myths that surround duplicate content, generic content, and syndicated content. First, let’s use Google’s definition of duplicate content as they are the most authoritative and widely used search engine:

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. (Source: Deftly Dealing With Duplicate Content)

Google is very clear and direct on the issue of duplicate content and penalties stating, “Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you’ve been duplicating deliberately, it’s unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty. (Source: Demystifying the “duplicate content penalty“)” If however you add new and unique content that enhances the scraped or republished content you will not be penalized for duplicate content. This brings me to what I call generic content. Generic content is generally mass produced and available for use by anyone. Some of this content is quite good and some is not. The point is not the quality of the content but its widespread use on many different sites with no unique content added to it by the site’s owner. What this means is that Google sees the hundreds (or more) websites that use this content as using duplicate content and penalizes them because there is often no author credit given and no link to the content’s source. This brings up a rather hotbutton term, ’scraping.’ Scraping is a relatively new term that generally refers to the redistribution of content without the webmaster’s consent and as such does not negatively affect the person being scraped (Source: Duplicate content due to scrapers). In journalism and academic circles, scraping would be considered plagiarism. You may be wondering how using this generic and scraped content is different from syndicating your own content. There are a couple of major but important differences that I have already alluded to. First, syndicated content is not ‘copied and pasted’ onto a website it utilizes an RSS feed to acquire the content. Second, syndicated content always provides a link back to the source of the feed.

Now for the possible penalties. According to Google:

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. (Source: Demystifying the “duplicate content penalty“)

To me the terms ‘deceptive’ and ‘manipulate search engine results’ are subjective but warrant a closer look. Deceptive could include trying to directly or indirectly take ownership of another person’s content. Google is very efficient at finding the original source of duplicate content, generic content, and scraped content. This original source is then indexed as the authoritative URL for that content and appears at the top of the search results. The site which uses the content with or without the consent of the webmaster is directly penalized with lower Page Rank (PR) which in turn means the site is also returned lower in search engine results. If you have ever visited one of these article farm websites you will often notice that the site which holds these generic articles has a pretty good PR while sites that use the material generally do not (or have a lesser PR than if they did not use the generic material). The manipulate search engine results would seem to imply some level of deception. Some sites will publish content that is basically keywords that are loosely strung together to create a post. In some instances there is not even an attempt to disguise a keyword page or post as an article and you basically have a bunch of keywords masquerading as content. This practice, termed ‘keyword stuffing,’ seems to fit under both the deceptive and manipulative categories. It is widely believed that keywords should not collectively comprise more than 10% of the total words in your article because Google penalizes sites that attempt to manipulate search results by keyword stuffing.

We spend numerous hours daily reading articles from authoritative websites. Some of this information is applicable and beneficial to the PREP network and some is not. We then begin testing various theories and techniques that we have encountered or devised ourselves. This testing is generally never seen by nor does it impact the members of Positive Real Estate Professionals and visitors to the network. If there is a chance that something may affect the network, we will conduct this testing on other sites that we maintain for this very purpose. Your site’s function and optimization is one of our main goals because this is how your site is found and if your site isn’t found, what is its purpose. I hope this post helps to clarify questions you may have had regarding content.