Anybody want to guess what this chart represents? There is a bit of a clue in the title. Give up?…. That chart shows organic traffic for a new website built almost entirely from freely available articles. It is the laziest type of content and according to every SEO expert out there should not be getting organic search traffic.
What you are looking at in that graph is a simple WordPress blog that has slowly been populated by articles based* on content from the various free article sources spread around the net. After about a week (using nothing more than simple sitemap submission) pages started to appear in Google’s index. From that point you can see how the traffic grows with just about each daily post – all this traffic is coming from Google’s SERPS. Sweet.
Then something strange happens, I stop posting (copy and paste is sooo boring) and the traffic starts to dry up. After a few days with no posting we now have a website that has no pages in Google’s index. This could be for a number of reasons
1. I stopped posting
2. I haven’t bothered to build back links
3. It gets penalized for being duplicate content
Now this where it gets fun. I’ve already proven that it is possible to get traffic by using free articles but it seems to only have a short life span. Anybody care to guess what happens when I start posting again and actually take a little bit of time to build some links into that website? I have my suspicions but part 2 of this article will show if you really can rank duplicate content in the long term.
*Article content was straight from the article directories, obviously the page layout/menus/other page text made each page unique.
11 Responses to “Yes, You Can Rank Duplicate Content – Part 1”
izu mou
April 15, 2009
Can wait for Part 2
izu mou’s last blog post..Honest Paying Survey Website!
|