All Your Result Are Belong To Us
Threadwatch has this today about Matt Cutts’ blog being googlewashed – virtually removed from results pages by the presence of a large number of duplicates of the same article on other sites. This is problematic for Google, and all the search engines, as it is predicated on the difficulty in not only identifying duplicate items, but in determining what’s “original” and what’s a ripped off (or even legitimate) duplicate.
SEO black hats are having a little fun at Matt Cutts’ expense, but to prove a point: without a base mechanism for asserting one’s ownership over content published on the web, there’s currently no way to keep that content from being used against you to diminish your page rank. Previously, there was concern about copyright – how does one protect and enforce the author’s rights over web content? This concern was typically driven by fear of lost ad revenue on one’s origin server, and lost syndication revenue for content that was distributed through paid content networks.
That’s still a valid concern, but with the advent of googlewashing, the emerging problem is that your content can be used to make you invisible to the search engines, while simultaneously boosting the results ranking for bad guys who are ripping off your work. In the case of Matt Cutts’ blog, Matt’s not in the top results for his own content, but the folks at DarkSEO are.