That’s the title of a topic on the Warrior Forum by an angry warrior, my reply to that person is below and therefore…

“WARNING: This Content is Duplicate Content!”

I hear what you say and although I don’t know where you’re coming from exactly what you said has a lot of truth to it.

It gets tiring having to deal with people’s false beliefs, their criticizing of “bluefart” (which is not the same as illegal) and the baggage they bring with them from places they hang out and things they read online and the things they don’t understand.

Maybe they fell into group mentality and play the part because it makes them feel like they belong to something or makes them feel smart?

It’s also funny to see people and groups criticize certain small things people do and yet they admit to doing things like setting up review sites, making up reviews or basing them on what others say without ever having actually had any experience with the products they promote – and yet no one says anything.

I’m not saying people can’t or shouldn’t do that but you know what they say about people who live in glass houses…

To be honest I’ve seen things, in SEO for example, where two polarizing mentalities are both right in different circumstances.

I’ve seen content sites do better and I’ve seen sites that do not get updated and are actually clones rank right beside the site they’ve copied.

In an experiment I nearly cloned a merchant’s site, got a keyword domain, competition in quotes wasn’t super high and not low either, also used some of his articles and did a little basic on page SEO and the only backlinking I did was one digg and submitting my RSS feed to an aggregator.

He probably beat me cause his site was older, maybe because it was registered for more than a year, no doubt he had more backlinks especially considering all his affiliates and he had a ton of articles on his site that I was to lazy to bother and copy.

I ranked number 5 and he number 3 for the same keyword with the exact same sales page. That ranking didn’t take very long to achieve (a month) and it stayed there until I decided not to renew my domain.

Still, two spots behind him isn’t bad.

This was two years ago and maybe Google has changed things since then but what people are saying now is what they said back then, too.

Probably helped that it wasn’t obvious I was an affiliate.

Site was never updated.

Fresh content? Duplicate Content?

This is what Google says is duplicate content straight from the horse’s mouth.

Duplicate content is not necessarily malicious in origin and not penalized but they pick and choose what gets shown when it gets out of hand however when it’s malicious or deceptive the deceptive site’s rank may suffer or be completely removed from results.

Google are a little too vague for my taste but most people never read what they say so I guess it doesn’t matter.

If you want to play with Google just try your best to give them what they want.

Guess what, sometimes Google is right and it would be wise to do what they say.

So the next time someone says “That’s duplicate content bla bla bla!” you can say “Yea? What’s your point? Oh really? OK, thanks. Have a nice day”

It’s not worth arguing about. You’re not gonna change the world.

You can do it until you get tired and jaded. I’m already tired.

Sometimes people won’t listen to you unless you charge them for it.

For real.

I have a theory on why some sites without updated content do OK and only a few pages thick but it’s just a theory. I’m not an SEO “expert” and I hate SEO but I know what I’ve seen. There’s a basic recipe I follow, try to be realistic and when I’m too lazy or hate certain parts I out task the rest (like link building).

There’s just more than meets the eye and my guess is a lot of so called SEO experts (which I am not one of) know barely more or no more than a lot of people here.

It might not be wise to ignore Google but push comes to shove and it’s definitely possible to not rely just on Google.

Just be creative.

You shouldn’t have all your eggs in one basket anyway.

PS. HTML sites (“regular” sites) can do just as well as blogs – sometimes worse and sometimes better (Tip: Get an XML sitemap on there, submit it, have an RSS feed, submit that, have the most important links on all or most your pages and always a way to get back to the homepage, try not to bloat it so it isn’t too slow)

PPS. Thanks for knocking Wikipedia. It always annoys me when people say “I found out on Wikipedia” It should be used as a springboard when really wanting information but nothing else in my opinion.