Let’s do one more post about content. First, consider Google’s Webmaster Blog’s post dispelling common duplicate content myths as a prerequisite read. Do I always trust what Google’s public relations tells me? Absolutely not, but it does confirm my own long standing protests against people who perpetuated the paranoia about duplicate content. So it makes a good point of reference.

The most common myth ensue with the paranoia is, “anytime I use content that is published somewhere else, I am sure to fall victim to duplicate content penalties.” This of course is bunk because for any specific terms related to an article you can show me I can find you 9 other sites that ranks for its terms that aren’t necessarily supplemental and full of penalties. However there is no doubt that there really is a duplicate content penalty. So we’ll discuss ways around it. One of my favorite parroted phrases is, “It’s not what content you use. It’s how you use it.” So we’ll start with formatting.

Here Is Some Spammy Text
Welcome to spam textville. This is just a bunch of spammy text. Text to fill and spam the streets. This is horrible spam text filled content that will surely get my spam site banned. Spam spam spam. It’s not food it’s text. Spammy text. I copied this spam text all over my site and others are copying it for their spammy text sites. I can’t believe I’m keyword stuffing for the words spammy text.

Alone in paragraph form this text is very easy to detect as spam and being autogenned. So the classic SEO ideology of “well written article style paragraphed text does well” gets thrown out the window with this example. However, since I would love nothing more than to rank for the term “Spammy Text” and this is all the content available to me I have to abandon the idea of keyword stuffing and find some new formats to put this text in that search engines will find acceptable.

How about an Ordered List?

  • Welcome to spam textville.
  • This is just a bunch of spammy text.
  • Text to fill and spam the streets.

    • Lists and bulleted points work very well because the text enclosed is meant to be very choppy, short, and contain repetition such as My goals are, The plan is, Do this..etc. etc. If the common ordered list is formatted as such, than we by all right can do the same.

    What about presenting it as user contributed?

    Comments (3)

    John Doe:
    Spam spam spam.

    Jane Doe:
    I copied this spam text all over my site and others are copying it for their spammy text sites.

    John Deer:
    Spammy text.

    How many of you readers have left complete crap in my comments? I’m not banned or penalized yet. :) Faking user contributed material works great because since it’s outcome is unpredictable therefore you can do virtually anything with it and get away. Including but not limited to inner linking.

    Mary Jane:
    I saw this wicked article about this on Eli’s blog subdomainspam.spammydomain.com/spammysubpage.html check it out!

    Break It Up Into Headings

    Heading 1


    Welcome to spam textville. This is just a bunch of spammy text.


    Heading 2


    Text to fill and spam the streets. Spam spam spam. It’s not food it’s text.

    All the keywords are there its just no longer spammy because its been broken up properly into nice little paraphrases. Once again, standardized = acceptable.

    Change The Format
    What about PDF’s? They may not support contextual ads very well but they most certain can cointain affiliate links. The engines also tend to be quite lenient on them and redundant text. For more information read my Document Links post.

    Let’s Move On
    So now that we can format our text to avoid the penalties what if we attempt to side step them all together? I talked about how to swap titles out using a thesaurus and IMDB data in my Desert Scraping post. So I won’t talk too much about it, but definitely consider doing some research on exploiting LSI in this matter.

    How about scraping the right content?
    Heavily syndicated content works well for duping and it has the added bonus of being exclusively high quality. For instance I sometimes like to snag shit from the good ol’ AP. It’s not the smartest legal move but seriously, who’s going to deeply investigate and do anything about it? In such an event its always an option to just remove the article upon receipt of the CDC letter.

    All in all, theres plenty you can do to dupe content and get away with it. It’s a pretty open game and theres a lot out there.

    Have Fun