Ranking #1 With Stolen Content? The Truth About SEO Hijacking & Duplicate Content

You can rank with duplicate content. Works even on competitive keywords. Full disclosure, what I'm about to share with you may only work for a short while, but for the time it does work, boy does it work. Like gang busters. First, the theory. And this is from the 21 SEO experiments article that I'm always sharing on this podcast. This article from seoserpa.com. And this was written, this was written a while ago. It was written a minute ago, but it still works. Duplicate content still works today. It's one of the scarier parts of search engine optimization. So, I'm going to talk about how it works, what people are seeing, and uh give my recommendation on should you use copied content like this. So, first the theory. When there are two identical documents on the web, Google will pick the one with a higher page rank and use it in the search results. It will also forward any links from any perceived duplicate towards the selected main document. Page rank basically just means authority. So, Google will pick the document that has the higher authority and use that in the search results. Why does it do this? Unless there is a valid reason for two or more versions of the same content, only one need exists. And what does that mean for you? It means that if you are creating unique and authoritative content that attracts quality links and shares, you should come out on top. Google will keep your version in the index and point all links aimed at the duplicates to your site. The bad news, for the good guys at least, this is not always the case. From time to time, a larger, more authoritative site will overtake smaller websites in the SERs for their own content. This is what Dan Petrovic from Djon SEO decided to test in his now famous SERs hijack experiment. Using four separate web pages, he tested whether the content could be hijacked from the search results by copying it and placing it on a higher page rank page, which would then replace the original in the SERs. And this is what happened. Oh my gosh. In all four tests, all four tests, the higher page rank copycat page beat the original. In three out of four cases, the original page was removed from the SERs. Imagine that. Imagine you write some baller piece of content and then some more authoritative site steals that jacks it puts it up on their site and your version the original that you spent all this time on is taken out of the SERs and that's what these tests showed. Dan Petrovic's tests go to prove that a higher page rank page will beat a lower page rank page with the same content even if the lower page rank page is the original source and even if the original page was created by the former wizard of Moz himself Ran Fishkin and there's a screenshot showing Djon SEO's site ranking for ranking number one for Rand Fishkin. Ran Fishiskin was outranked for his own name. So, the question arises, what can you do to prevent your own content from being hijacked? While there is no guarantee that you can prevent your own hard-earned content from being copied then beaten, Dan offers the following measures which may help to defend you from content thieves. Number one, add re equals canonical tag to your content using the full HTTP text. Number two, do proper internal linking to your pages. Number three, add Google authorship markup. And I actually want to pause here on Google authorship markup and tell you that in 2014, well, this is from victorious.com. Does SEO authorship matter? It's a nice write up of the reality. By the second half of 2014, Google had removed all author photos and most other authorship details from the SERs. In August, it stopped using the author markup entirely, marking the end of Google's authorship. So that was re equals author markup that was discontinued. And then in 2020, Google's author vectors patent reveals a complete shift in how the search engine intended to determine authorship in the future. The patent details a method of attributing an author to content through predictive analysis and machine learning. Basically, Google now had the technology to tell authors apart based on writing styles. It now uses this technology alongside other more concrete author signals to determine authorship without the need for markup or writer profiles. So if you have a website with a bunch of authors, use author boxes, use social pro, give their social profiles, have a description of the authors, and give specific pages for each author, which is cool, too, because these pages can rank for your guest author's names. And you see that all the time. I've done that myself. I have a site with a bunch of different guest articles. I gave individual pages for each guest showing all the articles they wrote, a description of the author, all their social links, and I see these ranking number one for the author's names. So number four from this list from how to defend you from content thieves is check for duplicate content regularly using a tool like copycape. Just because you can beat your this is again from this SEO experiments article. Just because you can beat your competitors by stealing their content, it does not mean you should. Not only is it unethical and downright shady to claim someone else's content as your own, but plagiarism can also land you in trouble. Shortly after running the experiment, Djon SEO received a warning message inside their Google Search Console account. The message cited the djonseo.com.au domain as having lowquality pages, an example of which is copied content. It literally says copied content. Around the same time, one of the copycat test pages also stopped showing in the SERs for some terms. This forced Dan to remove the test pages in order to resolve the quality issue for his site. So, it seems that while you can beat your competitors with their own content, it's definitely not a good idea to do so. But here is the reality. We're going to jump to this Reddit thread. How to not get penalized by legitimate duplicate content not plagiarized. It says, "I'm building a software as a service website and want to use Reddit as a place to post the change log and make any announcements such as updates on any downtime etc. However, I also want that change log shown on the SAS website itself as I would like to keep any users on my website remaining on my website. The issue, or at least I think it was many years ago, correct me if I'm wrong, is that when search engines find duplicate content on multiple websites, they would penalize the duplicate sites and in my case likely my own website as having appeared to have stolen and duplicated the content. And the top comment on this is from Multilander, who has been on the show before. He said, "There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. Having a few content pieces duplicated is very normal. Other tech companies also put their release notes in the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, GitHub, Hugging Face, etc. And then there's this great comment from Weblinker, who I'm always sharing on this show. Weblinker is a moderator of the SEO subreddit, one of my favorite commenters in SEO. Webb Linker said, "There is no duplicate content penalty. Why do people keep making this up? It's not published anywhere." So, the original poster responded and said, "This stemmed from when I followed Matt Cuts. probably a misunderstanding on my part or I've read content back in the day from not so good sources. I recall many years ago in having to ensure multiple domains redirected correctly to the primary domain to prevent duplication amongst a few similar endeavors. However, I suspect that was possibly to prevent diluting down the link equity as opposed to being penalized by SEO itself. And web linker says duplicate content causes quote unquote damage by just preventing the other page from showing. There's no penalty unless it's a DMCA. And this is what the SEO experiment said because the duplicate content on a higher authority site prevents the other site, the less authoritative site from showing. And the real risk is a DMCA. Weblinker continues just vary the page. There are lots and lots of examples. For example, it's not just original equipment manufacturers who sell on Amazon. The same product might be sold by multiple vendors. The whole Amazon product page is a template. Technically, an empty template page equals a duplicate page. No. Critical thinking and doing research is your friend. Finding a truism and locking yourself up is your enemy. You appear to have decided that your problem is duplicate content and locking yourself up there, thus holding you back from finding the solution. And actually digging deeper into Djon SEO's experiment. If you actually go and look at his site, he has an update. Google does take action against content scrapers. And he says, "In our two recent experiments, we created a number of pages copied from other domains." Here it is. This is what you got to pay attention to. Both cases got much attention, but it seems it also got the attention of Google's search quality algorithm. Today, we received the following message. And you see this all the time. SEO experiments are done that reveals the reality. They go viral revealing the reality of how SEO works. Google doesn't like this and then Google goes and makes an example of popular cases to discourage others from doing it. Happens all the time. So the sad reality the sad reality about this is one this still works. Two, there's even less risk if you alter the content to avoid takedowns. And three, I've even seen this being done on Reddit and Medium, which is a lot easier. This is black cats who are stealing content, putting it on Reddit and Medium, changing links or adding links to their own brands, and this beats the original content, which is removed from the SERs. It is so crazy, but should you do this? And my answer is no. Don't do it. Don't do it. It's It's honestly just evil. You could also get a DMCA hit. It could hurt you in so many different ways. You could get sued. don't do it. And just personally speaking, like yeah, it's evil. Don't don't steal other people's content. Come on. But can you protect yourself against this? And that's another very important question. And how do you protect yourself? And you can. One, you just continue doing marketing to increase your authority. Just all that's why the benefits in marketing come to the people who have a long-term perspective. When you have a long-term perspective, I promise you everything works out in the end. So if you continue doing marketing, your authority increases. Now you become the big player and it's hard to usurp you. Just continue doing marketing. But if you're not satisfied with that answer, the better answer on how to protect yourself against this is do bottom offunnel search engine optimization, which is what I'm always talking about on this show. Bottom ofunnel search engine optimization is people know what they want. They're turning to Google or LLM looking for a solution or to a brand that can satisfy what they are looking for. and you make pages targeting what they are looking for, saying why your brand satisfies what they are looking for. And when you are putting up these bottom offunnel SEO landing pages, doing this style of SEO that I'm always advocating, these pages are so specific to the brands that they are for that copying them doesn't even make sense because you you would be copying a bottom ofunnel SEO landing page for another brand with new with different features and different a different style. It doesn't make sense. What's more common is that people who want to outrank you are going to go to your page and ask themselves what's working and what's not and then take the elements that are working. But to actually do bottom offunnel SEO properly, you have to make these pages specific for your brand for how a specific product or service operates. So if you're doing bottom ofunnel SEO, you are already protected. If you're doing top offunnel SEO, then it's really you got to keep increasing your authority. bottom ofunnel SEO, which I always talk about. I literally have a course on it, compact keywords. That's the thing on my shirt. It says compact keywords. There are so many advantages to doing bottom ofunnel SEO. And protecting yourself from copycats is one of them. If you want to learn that method, compact keywords.com. That's my 13 and 1/2 hour SEO course. Lots of people are loving the course. You're going to love it, too. And continue building your authority. I have lots and lots of podcast episodes about fun ways to build links, fun ways to do marketing, fun ways to do SEO. If you listen to this show, you know what? You are protected. And that's everything that I got for you on episode 1 of my daily search engine optimization podcast. 1 days in a row doing this show. No days missed. Let's go. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow.