I have, for years, been testing issues relating to duplicate content and if there really is a penalty. I have seen some occurances that looked like duplicate content penalties, or filters, but nothing definitive and concrete. Then I came across about 40 of these types of results today, and the same article is appearing in the top ten of the SERPs. In this example, the first two results organically are the same article, posted on different sites.

All they did was remove the first two paragraphs and stick two new ones in. I have other examples, but they are in my spaces.

Thoughts? Comments? What are you seeing on your sites?

I have, for years, been testing issues relating to duplicate content and if there really is a penalty. I have seen some occurances that looked like duplicate content penalties, or filters, but nothing definitive and concrete. Then I came across about 40 of these types of results today, and the same article is appearing in the top ten of the SERPs. In this example, the first two results organically are the same article, posted on different sites.

SERP Dup Content Example

All they did was remove the first two paragraphs and stick two new ones in. I have other examples, but they are in my spaces.

Thoughts? Comments? What are you seeing on your sites?

Google has reported on their blog about the sensitive issue of “Spam Reports.” Most webmasters know there are two different “flavors” of spam reports. One is a “authenticated” form inside of Webmaster Tools – which requires you to have an account and a confirmed email address. The other is a “non-authenticated” form, where email addresses are not verified.

In the blog post, Google states that they investigate every spam report that is received through the authenticated form. However, the reports that go through the unauthorized form, “a large fraction of them are reviewed”.

In my recent experience, Spam Reports, regardless if they are fed through the authenticated form, are not being handled currently. The blog posts states that if “action is not seed against the offending site” there is no need to resubmit the request as appropriate action is being taken, it just isn’t being reflected in the SERPs.

Well, that’s nice, but if there is action being taken, wouldn’t it reflect in the SERPs? You would think it would. Just as I have been advising you to do, post your Spam reports through your Webmaster account in Google.

This is one of the areas that I want to discuss with Matt Cutts, hopefully that long awaited interview can be scheduled.