Original Content

[Big Juice]

Am I mistaken here or didn’t Google state (through unofficial channels) that their system is able to ferret out where content originates so that the right sites receive credit for their material? If this is the case then I have to say that they sure are slow in giving credit to where credit is due.

Without giving away any domains I will pass on some of my own personal experience regarding this topic.

A few years back I was working for a sports gambling site and I noticed that for a sports gambling site they sure didn’t have a lot of sports related articles on the site. Thinking to myself, that from a search engine standpoint, this omission was bad for business so I quickly remedied this by writing some articles covering the major sports. As I wrote these ‘league specific’ articles I felt that the information I was writing looked more like personal letters so I signed them as such.

The owners of the sports gambling site liked the name I penned them under so much that they encouraged me to write more articles using that persona. I agreed to give it a go and before I realised it had happened, I had developed a brand. The first few articles I wrote began to do exceptionally well in the search engines so I decided to take it to the next level by purchasing the domain for this new brand.

I took the articles and created a site around the material and continued to develop new articles on a daily basis. I also continued to post the material on the first sports betting site with another half a dozen sites or so adding this material as well. This relationship went on for about a year with the sites ranking well in the search engines for the articles. In fact the sports betting sites were doing so well that they actually all got bought up by a major player in the sports betting market.

When the sites got sold the relationship between my branded site and the sports betting sites ended with no further articles being reprinted. It has been about 4 months since I last posted an article on any of the sports betting sites and yet, the sports betting sites still rank higher in Google for my old articles then they do for the newest articles on my site.

If Google has a preference for fresh, topical content and has a thought towards crediting the content originator, why is it taking Google so long to credit this author? Keep in mind that the site is named after the author and is not some keyword stuffed domain designed to manipulate the SERPs. Also, the site has a minimum of 4 new pages added every week and those pages are all within the theme of the site.

Now I would understand that if the older sports betting sites were still reprinting these articles, that given their higher PR, they would probably be receiving higher SERPs but as I previously stated, it has been months since they added any new material. Where is the freshness - relevancy filtering in this case, why aren’t they kicking in if they exist?

I am willing to wait to see how long it takes Google to give credit where credit is due but the longer it takes the more suspicious I will become of their results.

[Jill Whalen]

Am I mistaken here or didn’t Google state (through unofficial channels) that their system is able to ferret out where content originates so that the right sites receive credit for their material? If this is the case then I have to say that they sure are slow in giving credit to where credit is due.

No, I don't believe they've ever stated that.

I'm sure they would like to be able to, but there are so many factors involved in doing that, so they generally just seem to go with the most popular and/or older site, when the issue crops up.

[JohnW]

I‘m pretty sure Google does not care who the original author of the article is. They don’t seem to really see an “article” on a page anyway – what they see is just a document, a page of content.

When they see two documents that contain a lot of identical content, they do sometimes seem to try to figure out which document (web page) is the original, but often the more important page is the one that gets the credit, regardless of whether or not it is the original. The measurement of a pages importance is related to the quality of the other pages, both on and off of the web site, that are linked with the page in question, and is not directly related to the actual content of the page.

>I am willing to wait to see how long it takes Google to give credit where credit is due

You may have a long wait unless you increase Googles perceived value of the new pages you are adding. Adding them to a web site that is important will help, if they are linked to correctly. The best way is to also get other websites to link directly to your articles.