Page Rank & Content

[junglekid]

Steven Clayton and Tim Godfrey, the creators of Commission Blueprint, have released a 3-page report sharing the results of a page rank study they've done over 200 domains for a period of one year.

Some of their findings go against several established theories about page rank:

- Google doesn’t care about the “freshness” of your content
- Google doesn’t care about the “quality” of your content
- Google doesn’t care about duplicate content
- Google doesn’t care if you change the contents of a page

Although this seems to be a never-ending discussion, before you get upset or "heated" about it, I recommend visiting their blog and downloading the report. A special recomendation goes for reading all the comments there.

Here's the link: http://theimblueprint.com/does-googl...about-content/

[Fergal]

Interesting report, thanks for sharing it with us, I've printed and read it, but I didn't read all the comments. I do agree that the most important factors determining a site's PR are the number and quality of web pages that link to it. However, personally I find it difficult to believe the main findings.

Google is a hugely successful search engine. The reason they are successful is that they provide quality search results to their users. They could not do this if they didn't care about site quality or duplicate content. If Google regularly presented web searchers with poor quality sites and / or lots of duplicate content, they would move from Google and start using a competing search engine.

[pendelton]

Fergal, G doesn't really care about dupe content. I can take the same content from a site with little or no SEO, place it on 10 sites, then have the first site and a little more SEO than the original, and each consecutive site a little more yet, taking the original site and placing it, at best, in the #11 spot.

Sites with a presence, such as BAF, would be more difficult to do that too.

Consider the article sites, a lot of that content is duped, but they have very hi PRs and traffic.

[DEADMAN]

Junglekid, the information is quite right. I agree to the point. I'd started my own site and when I enter my sitename, it doesn't display up? However, it has been more than weeks.

- Google doesn’t care about the “freshness” of your content
I believe but what keywords we search are displayed in Google.

- Google doesn’t care about the “quality” of your content
- Google doesn’t care about duplicate content
- Google doesn’t care if you change the contents of a page
Yes, nothing to do with quality. Only high page ranked and popular site, no matter how bad articles it displays up. And too duplicated and however change to contents takes too long.

[Fergal]

Fergal, G doesn't really care about dupe content. I can take the same content from a site with little or no SEO, place it on 10 sites, then have the first site and a little more SEO than the original, and each consecutive site a little more yet, taking the original site and placing it, at best, in the #11 spot...

You learn something new everyday and it is always interesting to have beliefs challenged, so I'm definitely open to correction and education on this. Are you saying that Google has no regard for duplicate content to the extent that they will present very poor search results to web searchers using the Google search engine?

Using your example, are you saying that Google would present searchers with links to the exact same article, on ten different web pages, as the top ten results for a search for a particular key phrase? So if I wrote an article targeting the key phrase "dedicated web site hosting" and put this article on ten different websites and did SEO for each of these pages, better than anyone else, that Google would list this article on each of it's top ten results for the search term "dedicated web site hosting"?

My opinion is that web searchers would be unhappy to be brought to the exact same content, from multiple search engine listings. Hence, Google make an effort to maintain a quality service, by penalising duplicate content.

[pendelton]

It all depends on the keywords and number of articles about the topic, note I did say the original would get placed, 'at best, in the #11 spot'.

And not all the articles that I do the seo work on, unless it is a made up word, should make spots 1- 10. But, if I apply more SEO than the original I will rank better.

The issue comes from this.
If you place an article on this site, and G doesn't get that article this week, as it already crawled your site, but I see it, swipe it, and post it on my site, the day before G crawls it, mine would the be original, according to G.

Google knows of this issue with their methods, so giving any special ranking to what may, or may not, be the original article is not possible, since they have no way of knowing.

[devilbatista]

- Google doesn’t care about the “freshness” of your content
- Google doesn’t care about the “quality” of your content
- Google doesn’t care about duplicate content
- Google doesn’t care if you change the contents of a page

junglekid, I agree with all the points you have made. Google cares non of them. Page Rank just increases when backlinks increases. You have made really good points about what google seems to be irresponsible.

[SallyM]

Google doesn't care about duplicate content???

If they can show a site that proves this then all they can shop is a site that has slipped through the net, the site will eventually fall under the duplication header - i have seen sites get through over a year of google crawls across many data centres, it only takes one small tweak in the algo and then BANG they have you.

[Fergal]

I'd also be interested in seeing an example of a search term, that when you search for it in Google, you get a few different listings for pages with exactly the same content, in the top ten results.

[junglekid]

Google doesn't care about duplicate content???

If they can show a site that proves this then all they can shop is a site that has slipped through the net, the site will eventually fall under the duplication header - i have seen sites get through over a year of google crawls across many data centres, it only takes one small tweak in the algo and then BANG they have you.

I'd also be interested in seeing an example of a search term, that when you search for it in Google, you get a few different listings for pages with exactly the same content, in the top ten results.

I think it's important to clarify the difference between "Page rank" and "Google ranking": Page rank(PR) is a number assigned by Google (from 0 to 10) that somehow "rates" the importance of a web page to the world and is not search-term related. Google ranking is a relative position a website occupies as a result of a search term query.

Steven Clayton & Tim Godfrey's report (and their findings) is about Page rank not about Google ranking. But they admit exceptions, as stated here:

" One word of caution…we are going to make statements of fact such as “Google doesn’t care about…”etc. These statements are based on the VAST majority of the domains that we tested, NOT 100% of them."

And here is what they say about content:

" Google doesn’t care about the “freshness” of your content - Updating the
content every day, once a week, once a month, or not at all had NO impact on
Page Rank. The extreme example of this are three home pages (PR3‐4)
where the content hasn’t changed at ALL in 3 years, and the PR has not gone
lower. It has gone up down over time, but never statistically lower than
where it started. We also saw this in our test group over 9‐12 months."

"Google doesn’t care about duplicate content‐ At least when evaluating
page rank, Google doesn’t care if the content on the page is unique."

I personally tend to accept the information provided by them as legitimate because: a) it's not their "opinion" or "thoughts", it's the result of a full year study they had 2 employees working on and covering 200 websites; b) the main reason for this study was to apply the results on their own websites, not to sell another SEO product...they are even giving the information away for free, no signup required.

BTW, re Google ranking, I've seen so much rubbish on Google's first pages at times that I seriously doubt these "content" theories...

[seanstevens]

Google try to watch content where they can, but the fact is there is so much out there that it is impossible to police correctly all of the time. I have a few friends working at Google and I was in their office in Dublin last year, they spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve the results from searches and how to prevent people taking advantage of their system.

They don't want rubbish or duplications clogging up web searches as down the line it will have a negative impact on their revenues.

That said, I think they have an impossible task.

Sean

[Fergal]

Thanks for the explanation junglekid. Your clarification of the difference between Google rank and Page Rank helps the discussion a lot.

I have a suspicion that the publishers of the report were being deliberately controversial when they used statements like "Google doesn't care about..." Good for them, I'm sure their clever marketing helped generate a lot of publicity for the report and their site.

...at Google and I was in their office in Dublin last year...

Are their offices impressive, I've never had the pleasure of a visit? Attracting Google to Ireland was a great success for online business here.

[seanstevens]

Are their offices impressive, I've never had the pleasure of a visit? Attracting Google to Ireland was a great success for online business here.

Very impressive. The amount of space the staff have to relax is amazing. If I remember correctly the techies get 40% of their time as "thinking" time, where they can go and sit in a giant been bag or go play some games or one of the massage chairs.

The free food and drink is also great, fridges and machines all around the building. The lunch was amazing. Great chefs and the choice was like going down your local supermarket.

I did feel a little out of place though with all of the 20 something young ladies walking about - more like the Paris fashion show than a place of work.

Sean