Help - Google thinks we ripped off content when we are the source

Recently we published a blog post about Celebrity Scandals and Flash Games:

http://www.playedonline.com/blog/2010/02/04/a-decade-of-scandal-and-the-games-they-inspired


If you Google the first sentence from our post we're no where to be found. The Digg.com story that links to our blog post is #1.

If you repeat the same query with omitted results included we are #4.

Why can't Google figure out that we're the source of this post? How can we avoid such problems?

Google knows that Digg is a more powerful and popular site than yours.

If you want to remedy this then get more backlinks and do not submit your content to Digg until you have backlinks into that page and boosting it. Of course your visitors could submit the page, so you do not have total control over the submission.

But Google should also see the link pointing from the Digg page to our article. Doesn't that carry any weight?

It might help you but it is apparently not enough to save you.

You need to improve authority of your website.

This is one of the rare occasions where Google take page rank into consideration via the homepage or the internal page where the data is duplicated.

In Google's defense it is extremely hard to work out who is the original author of any material published on the web, you only have to look at the millions of eccomerce who use amazon script and same descriptions in the product item.

Google stated that where duplicate material is shown they will simply take other factors into account, one of them being page rank to determine original ownership.

Which is totally flawed if you ask me, dont need to explain why its obvious.

They did state they were working on solving this problem by scanning dates, the problem with this though is dates can be manipulated in script.

In your case you are lucky, most cases of duplicate material is deleted or rather stored and not shown at all in search engines, perhaps a handful at best and the rest is deleted.

You can test this in google, type in a product description taken from amazon and place it in google search and you will find only a handful of the same description pop up.

In practice if they kept duplicate material for all the millions of ecommerse amazon affiliates with same description there would be millions of page response on the search but there isn't.

In the case of the ecommerse people, they have no choice, they have to outrank amazon or obtain a decent pagerank above the rest of the million or so affiliates. Otherwise thousands of pages are not indexed, hence never seen and the business is flawed before it is seen.

The only other way around it is to report it to Google or in the case of the ecommense nightmare, remove all descriptions and just take images and other data from affiliates, write your own content for products.

I wish they would come up with a solution for duplicates, not fair on the main person who should benefit the most, the author.

If you got it copyrighted then you could sue a company that copies your content. But not Digg if you submitted it. I don't see as why Google can't distinguish this from Digg. Just get a few good links to it if your content is that good. Then you'll be back.

Thanks for the replies. They do raise a few more questions:

1. If our content was not submitted to Digg until it got indexed, would this still have happened?
2. Is this about domain authority or pagerank? I doubt we could ever get more domain authority than digg.com but our blog post will get more pagerank over time than the digg story page.
3. Does anyone have a complete list of factors which Google uses when determining which source is the original and which is the duplicate? Can this change over time?

"Be patient"... Google must crawl 200+ billion pages, through probably 100 times that in links, and associated 200+ variables in order to organize its results... that an amazing order of magnitude that doesn't happen all at the same time.

A domain with the authority of Digg that generally happens quickly, but if you factor in the millions of external links that must only then be credited to a massive amount of other pages in a general order of authority... seriously that takes time.

I missed this. Would you please be so kind as to show me where Google "stated" this?

This was quite an old statememt made last year, i can see the point as to why they bought other factors into it, was posted later on the internet.

if you think about it what else can they do. They decided to base it on the webmaster tools and add other ranking factors, one of which was page rank.

You see your webmaster account, it shows you duplicates and warms people to redirect, going back to 07 it was probably stating to avoid all duplicates.

pagerank was one factor, someone did ask other factors, the other was clean content which we later found to be avoid duplicates at all costs, which is not new news, been saying that for years.

It makes me laugh when people dismiss the importance of pagerank, Google would not bother with it if it was not important to ranking factors.

Iv seen many top sites showing up in top 10 with decent pagerank, infact at least half, still see it today, pagerank means nothing, total nonsense.

Respectfully: Google also used to calculate keyword density.
Further you are making the statement that Google uses PR to unbreak a tie when the same content is found on 2 different sites. This would be pretty big news to me. Not trying to call you out, just would love to see a first-hand account of this. I would think anyone making this statement knows little of SEO.
Please show me where I'm wrong

If I completely misunderstood your point, apologies.

This article touches up on some of the fine guildlines with duplication, not the one i wanted to find where they stated pagerank is a factor or hinted at it.

However this is close to the original article.

>>en we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.
We select what we think is the "best" URL to represent the cluster in search results.
We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL. >>


>>>No; it's because how the heck are they going to outrank Amazon if they're providing the exact same listing? Amazon has a lot of online business authority (most likely more than a typical Amazon affiliate site does), and the average Google search user probably wants the original information on Amazon, unless the affiliate site has added a significant amount of additional value.>>>



Link popularity creates pagerank, the article on amazon is interesting in the link, authority is exactly that, in google's eyes this is measured by pagerank.

High pagerank is also worth thousands of backlinks within itself, we have all seen the charts, pagerank 8 is like having 2 million backlinks.

What else can they really do to determine who is placed where, only so many factors they can take into account, probably traffic, certainly pagerank and anything else of use to determine which site would be best to list.

Bloody interesting article, not the one I wanted.
Google duplicates

PageRank DOES NOT have any direct impact on results... as results are 100% topic oriented and PageRank is 100% topic neutral.

I beg to differ on duplicate content, apart from that would agree with this.