Friday, May 6, 2011

Little or no original content ?


As far as I can tell, those links are not negatively affecting your site's performance in our search results, so I wouldn't worry too much about them. If you feel that you're seeing changes in the way that your site is ranking in our search results, then I'd recommend focusing on your own site, on your own content, and working to make it the best it can possibly be.

One thing I noticed while looking at your site is that you have a wide range of interests and accordingly, very different topics on your website -- from photo manipulation to webdesign & SEO to religious topics and probably some that I missed. Generally speaking, that's fine, however, personally, when I was clicking around your site I found it a bit distracting because I ended up getting lost a bit. I found some interesting content on editing graphics, but I wasn't able to go to other parts of your site from there -- it felt a bit disconnected, and not as integrated as it could be. Sometimes issues like that can confuse users -- and sometimes even our algorithms (when they can't easily pick up the context and the connections between pages on your website).  Personally, that's something I'd try to improve -- not directly for search, but rather for your users, and if users love & recommend your site more, then I'm sure you'll start seeing that reflected in search as well over time.



It looks like the majority of the content on your site comes from other sources. In situations like that, we may choose to focus our efforts on other sites that provide significant unique, compelling, and high-quality content of their own. You can find out more about that at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359 & http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66361 .

If you wish to be listed in our search results, I'd recommend working on your site to make sure that all of its content is of the kind that our algorithms would want to show to searchers, and then submitting a reconsideration request detailing the changes that you've made. ..

I think you'd have a better chance by removing all scraped / copied / rewritten / obfuscated content -- it generally doesn't make sense for our algorithms to spend time on a site that does not provide unique, compelling, and high-quality content. https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/msg/webmasters/ElrA6rYrXmY/YfZhKVUasqYJ


Tarakt, keep in mind that unique, compelling, and high-quality content is extremely important to our algorithms and to our users. Rewriting content, "spinning," automatically translating or otherwise generating your content automatically is not something that appeals to our users.
Personally speaking, I am particularly unhappy when this is done on a site with a health theme... such as one that publishes content like http://healthwikionline.com/is-there-a-healthy-diabetes-diet/ which has the potential (given that it's automatically generated) to cause harm to readers. Can you explain the reasoning behind publishing content like that?
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6657e6fc69c7b145

One thing that is very important to our users and to our algorithms is that sites are unique, compelling and of high quality. In general, it's not enough to manually or automatically rewrite or automatically translate content -- having a website primarily made up of content such as that would not be interesting to our users, and could be seen as an automatically generated site that we would not want to include in our search results. If this were to apply to your site(s), then I would strongly recommend removing any and all such content, making sure that the content you provide is of the highest possible quality, unique and compelling and can stand on its own for users. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=0ef9d971a5c752de&hl=en
As mentioned by the others (thanks, everyone!) I'd strongly recommend focusing on unique and compelling content. Our users expect to find a variety of high-quality content in our search results, and our algorithms work hard to make this happen. Reusing content in a way that is indexable (such as on http://www.mickjaggernews.com/news/google.aspx and other pages) is something that we strongly discourage in our Webmaster Guidelines. To resolve this, I would recommend working to make sure that all of your crawlable and indexable content is unique, compelling, and of a high quality. It's fine to use scripts to automatically create content for your website, but those parts should be blocked from crawling and/or indexing using the normal mechanisms such as the robots.txt or robots meta tags. Once you've done this, I imagine that submitting a reconsideration request detailing the changes that you've made would be a good next step. Hope it helps! http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6c49ef0368a23188&hl=en
One factor that is very important to us is that a site has unique and compelling content. If content is already found on other sites, it makes very little sense for us to crawl, index and show duplicates. With that in mind, I would work hard at removing all content which comes from elsewhere from your website and making sure that the unique and compelling content on your site is in the foreground. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=0b4ad1ffe5cfb7ed&hl=en
Looking at your site, I only see pages that contain content from other sites. I have a hard time finding unique and compelling content, content for which we would want to send users to your site (and not any other site). Having some auto-generated content is fine, we just prefer not to have this kind of content indexable. So I would recommend making sure that all indexable pages on your site are significantly unique and compelling, and contain content which is important to users, content which users want to recommend to their friends -- enough so that we'd want to absolutely make sure that your site is indexed properly. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62305e9e863213d5&hl=en
Circling back to your original problem -- I think it would be very wise to not only look at technical issues. While small technical glitches can cause problems, our crawlers are pretty adept to looking over issues that don't impact the way that we crawl and index content (the largest part of the web has technical issues in one way or another). It's certainly a good idea to clean up these technical issues as you find them, but personally, I think it's even more important to make sure that your content and your site's strategy has a long-term focus on providing unique and compelling content to users. Making something available on the web that does not already exist, providing something of value that goes well beyond what other sites have offered, is a great way to move forward in the long run. With that in mind, I would definitely take critical comments - such as those above - seriously and think about ways that you can make sure that your website's strategy has a high chance of success in the long term http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=4f2c48776c983e0a&hl=en
Also, it looks like some of your content may already be found on the web (such as on Stack Overflow) -- keep in mind that our algorithms prefer high-quality, unique and compelling content, not content that has been copied, rewritten, reprocessed or otherwise modified in an attempt to appear original. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a3eda51c1737fca&hl=en
As a general recommendation, we like to return results to our users that provide unique and compelling content. Looking through your website, it seems little content of it is unique to your website. To take two examples, from this page: A search for a long bit of text from it shows many other websites: So while we do use the quantity and quality of links in determining the PageRank of a page, it's even more important to our algorithms that the content is of high-quality, unique and compelling to our users. I would start with focusing on providing your own unique content that users want to view. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=1e713d8bb94459e4&hl=en
You want to keep in mind that the users (and also our algorithms) prefer unique and compelling content. See the following related Help Center article: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66361 In case of affiliate sites, the webmaster should make sure to have elements in the pages that are unique and valuable for the users, give a good reason for them to visit the site. With websites like that, generally my advice is to take note of the Webmaster Guidelines ( http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 ), change the content and/or site if needed and then submit a reconsideration request through Webmaster Tools ( http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843 ). http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=3a9bf6e85bf77c02&hl=en
In general, I don't see anything technically incorrect with the way that you're providing your website, and it appears that we're regularly crawling and indexing your content. Blocking the browser context menu is really a bad practice that I'd recommend avoiding (it doesn't protect anything - it just makes it harder for legitimate users to use your website). The IE6-redirect is currently not causing Googlebot problems, but as the others mentioned, it seems unnecessary as well. Given that the technical side is not causing issues, you may want to look at the content on your site, and the way users are using & recommending it to others. Looking at a random page, http://www.besttechnology.org/techdetail/pd1_7_2010.php , it looks like some of the content there is from other sources (such as from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/technology/26security.html ). In general, users expect to find unique and compelling content on sites that we list in our search results -- so our algorithms work hard to make sure that this is possible. If a site were to mostly reproduce news & articles already published elsewhere, then that is generally not going to be a strategy that will help the site to succeed in the long run. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=46a4e97c964b849d&hl=en
Additionally, one thing to keep in mind is that it's important for our algorithms that your site has unique and compelling content. Copying content from other sources, even if it is just slightly rewritten, is a bad idea and goes against out Webmaster Guidelines and can result in your site being removed from our index. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=1bb051fde3fb784a&hl=en
In general, reconsideration requests are processed within a few days, and if you do not see changes, then it's possible that you have not remedied the issues (or, in some cases, it's possible that the site does not have anything specific that can be affected with a reconsideration request). The forums here are often even better than feedback from Google -- the users here are fast, knowledgeable and extremely honest. Taking Leonel80's comparison and modifying it slightly, I'd say it's more like going to the doctor with a headache, hoping for a pill, and finding out that you should to stop eating chocolate & go running more often; it's not easy, and maybe you'll decide to ignore it, but the doctors here are fairly experienced :-). Looking through your site, I agree that you do have some novel ideas there, but overall, users expect to find unique and compelling content in the search results, so indexing content that's already been indexed before, and showing those copies in search results, might not always be what users want. Our algorithms work hard on providing users a variety of content. One thing I would try to do with a site like that is to make sure that the crawlable and indexable content is all of high quality, and unique and valuable. It's fine to sometimes reuse content from elsewhere -- as long as that's not the bulk of your site and provided it's blocked from crawling and indexing appropriately. You can find more about our stance on this kind of content in the links below. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=564569678699b25f&hl=en
One thing that I would recommend is working hard to make sure that your site has unique and compelling content. I realize this is a bit hard for a site that focuses only on lyrics for a certain band, but I bet there are ways to handle this :-). http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5be2b45f776c8893&hl=en
Looking at your sites, I can see that our algorithms might have a hard time finding the unique and compelling content on them. For example, a random page I looked at, http://www.wtechz.com/2011/01/adsense-account-getting-trick-2011.html , seems to be copied on (from?) various other sites. When our algorithms have a hard time recognizing the unique content that provides value to our users, it's possible that they will decide to show other sites instead. To fix that, I'd strongly recommend removing all of the copied, rewritten, "respun", or translated content and making sure that your site focuses on topics where you can provide a unique insight that our users will want to find in the search results. Once you have taken steps to make sure that this is the case, it would probably make sense to submit a reconsideration request, detailing the changes that you've made. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=661286661d61fab2&hl=en
I would recommend listening to the feedback provided here by the others -- it really is important to us (and our users!) that a site has unique and compelling content. I would strongly recommend going back to your site, removing all of the copied and rewritten content, making sure that your site gives users something of high value, something they'll want to come back to and recommend to their friends. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=55b6ee5a300a9690&hl=en
- Many of your pages seem to be focused on a video from YouTube. For me, it feels a bit weird for search engines to send users to your site when the users are actually looking for content hosted elsewhere. When combined with pages like http://www.topcountrymusicvideos.com/marty-robbins-youtube-videos/ that appear to consist only of shared text ("This page contains Marty Robbins YouTube Videos that will be updated on a regular basis.(...)") together with YouTube videos, I imagine that our algorithms might prefer to send users to sites that have a bit more unique and compelling content. In general, I would recommend working to make sure that your site has as much unique and compelling content as possible; working to make sure that your site would stand alone even without videos from other sites. Additionally, I would recommend working to make sure that pages such as the above that do not have unique content on them, are blocked from indexing. You could do that with a "noindex" robots meta tag. - The comment about your site having to stand on it's own even without videos leads to my second point: I couldn't watch most videos from your site -- they're all blocked in my country (Switzerland). I don't know if that's based on your choice of videos or based on the content owners' preferences, but it's frustrating :-) (I would never admit it in public, but I'm currently listening to Johnny Cash while writing this post.). It would be a neat addition -- and provide some unique value! -- to have a way of letting users know about content that is or is not available in their country, perhaps even allow users to flag videos that are blocked in their location so that you can show that data to others in the same location. Obviously search engine algorithms would want more unique content than just a "yes/no", but that would certainly be useful for users like me :-). http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=65ccf406b7790e01&hl=en
One thing I'd recommend is focusing on unique and compelling content -- pick a subject that fascinates you, where you have a lot of knowledge and go with that. We also have a great SEO starter guide, that helps you once you have great content, I've linked to it below. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7960f45a62573711&hl=en
As mentioned by Squibble, I too think your site could really profit from more unique and compelling content. Without content, all that we find when crawling and indexing your site is tags and domain names. This doesn't really give us that much information based on which we can understand your pages. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=4e7a3568a5befd0d&hl=en
Looking at your pages for the topic that you mentioned, I'm a bit worried: http://www.gunbladespecialist.com/2010/04/29/mall-world-facebook-cheats/ ... mentions "Since I don’t really pay close attention to Facebook Games in general, (...) there seems to be no sites on the internet offering Mall World Cheats or even Tips. (...) I will be posting Mall World Cheats, Tips and Hacks as soon as they become available. I will also start to feature more Facebook Games, since I think it can really generate a fair share of traffic in my blog which will lead to more “make money online” opportunities." ... which to me, sounds like your site doesn't actually have any content on that subject, so I'm curious as to why you believe it would make sense to show your site for that topic? This also seems to apply to other topics on your site: http://www.gunbladespecialist.com/2010/05/03/treasure-isle-facebook-cheats/ "So what about Treasure Isle Facebook Cheats? As much as I want to provide them, there just seems to be no cheat or bug in Treasure Isle (...)" http://www.gunbladespecialist.com/2010/05/05/happy-island-facebook-cheats/ "I’m quite new in the game and I haven’t discovered a bug or exploit that we can classify as a cheat in Happy Island." gunblade06, posts like these could be somewhat misleading to users, don't you think? Instead of writing about topics like these, I would strongly recommend writing about topics where you can really provide unique and compelling content that users will want to refer their friends to your site for. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=01e3238cb3cc75ca&hl=en
It looks like your site is fine and does not have malware on it. Our systems know that things can change, so they don't "hold a grudge" against a site that used to have malware or that used to be hacked. That said, looking at your site, I could imagine that it would really help to have more unique and compelling content, so that our systems have something to go by. Content that's unique and compelling is something that our users love to see and love to get referred to. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5cfef18b3aa75a8a&hl=en
One thing that is very important to us is that a site like that contains a significant amount of unique and compelling content. Links, headlines and snippets from other sites does not provide a lot of value to our users -- they'd probably prefer to be sent to the source directly. I'm sure there's a way to manage that & once you have worked out a way to make sure that the majority of your site is made up of unique and compelling content, I'd submit a reconsideration request detailing the changes that you have made. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7613ea61b12beba3&hl=en
Thanks for providing your URL. I'm unable to spot any obvious signs of hacking, but make sure you keep your software updated and use secure passwords to be safe. Looking at the content of your site, I think you could benefit from reading Google's webmaster guidelines (linked below) if you're concerned about your site's appearance in Google's search results. We do not guarantee indexing for any site, but following the guidelines puts you on the right track to showing up in our search results. Google likes to index pages which provide unique and compelling content, and provide an overall good user experience. So, making great content that your visitors will find useful should be goal #1. And since you accept advertising on your site (which on its own is certainly not a violation of the guidelines), you'll want to pay special attention to our article on paid links, which I'm linking to at the bottom of this post. If you feel your site violates these guidelines, you're welcome to submit a reconsideration request via Webmaster Tools after making the necessary fixes to your site. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6011dc8de3ed1506&hl=en
Trying out your site, it appears that you just scrape Google's search results with a filetype:pdf (for PDFs) addition, is that correct? If so, that would be against not only our terms of service but providing those pages for crawling and indexing would also be against our Webmaster Guidelines. I would recommend working to create a website that is built on unique and compelling content which is not just copied and repackaged from other sites. If you wish to keep your website's model, I would recommend making sure that none of the search results pages - or scraped & repackaged URLs - are available for crawling and indexing. Additionally, I would recommend making sure that your site does not infringe on the terms of service of the search engines that you use to create your search results. I realize this is not an easy change, but given your site's structure at the moment, there is no easy solution :-/ http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5c8ae5d1f7a8cb88&hl=en
While you mentioned that there might be 100 sites that are similar on the web, I wouldn't compare my site with them. Make your site better than all the rest, make it the best, most complete site, with unique and compelling content that users are looking for. That generally means a lot of work, but if you're looking to remain relevant on the web for the long run, you should make sure that you provide something of high value, that users are not going to forget for the long run either :). http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=363d403880568fd0&hl=en
As mentioned by others (thanks for all the suggestions!), it looks like the changes you're seeing here may be from an algorithmic change. As part of our recent algorithmic changes (which the outside world sometimes refers to as the "May Day update" because it happened primarily in May), our algorithms are assessing the site differently. This is a ranking change, not any sort of manual spam penalty. You can hear more about this change in Matt's video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ6CtBmaIQM Working on making sure that your site is of a high-quality and has unique and compelling content is certainly a good idea, and something I would always recommend working on, regardless of the site's current standing. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=4a54a17fbb8649c7&hl=en
That said, looking at your site, it appears that it mostly just shows Google Maps and links to another maps service.... For us, that might be a bit problematic as it's our goal to show users unique and compelling content -- not just content from other sites. With that in mind, I would not just wait for things to settle down, but also work very hard to make sure that your site is really unique, that it contains awesome content which users demand to see in search results. In the long run, that is one of the most vital elements of any website. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6cdc2d67751579b5&hl=en
I think Squibble's point is worth looking at -- your site is titles "All about FC Barcelona" and you mention that your content is based on what you see in TV. While I can't judge the quality of your content, I would - personally - probably expect a bit more than just TV-based content. That said, perhaps that doesn't apply to the rest of your site, but anyway, I would definitely look into making sure that your content is of high-quality, unique and compelling. Finally, this is just my personal opinion, looking through your site and the page that you mentioned above, I noticed that even with a large monitor, I am only seeing ads and banners when viewing your pages. Have you considered how users might react when they are confronted with "just ads" (with the content buried a click or two away)? That may not have a direct impact on your site's standing in search engines, but if users were to be confused by the ads, that will almost certainly have an indirect impact -- with new users not digging down to see your content, and accordingly not recommending it to their friends. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7e275b8f88ce9da4
As the others have mentioned here, our users, and our algorithms, cherish content that is of high-quality, unique and compelling. When content is copied, rewritten, respun, automatically translated, etc, then it doesn't really make sense for us to index it again. If you find that your site has content like that, then I'd recommend removing all of it, making sure that the rest of your content is great, and then submitting a reconsideration request, detailing the changes that you have made. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6426ec62a35cec6c
Both copied, high-quality content and low-quality, unique content are not really what users want to find on the web. If you're asking me what kind of content you should have on your website, then I'd personally recommend using high-quality, unique (not rewritten / respun / retranslated) content is the only strategy that makes sense in the long run. Your users will recognize attempts to cut corners, and they'll react accordingly. If you want to have a long-term web-presence, then you need to provide something of unique value to users, something they will want to come back to on their own, something they will recommend to their friends. Create something that you can be proud of, something that will continue to stand on its own over the years. Search engines are not interested in content that's generated for search engines, they want to serve their users with something users would find useful. Low quality or copied, rewritten, respun, retranslated content is not something that users like. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=27888eeb80f5a978&hl=en