I Got a Free Blog – Thats Good Link Juice Right? (part 1)

The are many cliche’s that warn us there is no free lunch. But that does not mean we understand where the cost of those lunches really is. If we are used to paying the waiter, but the real cost is elsewhere it can be confusing.

The challenge is similar in technology, marketing and other areas that are changing rapidly. In the world of Free Blogs, the value and costs sometimes are hard to find. DRKent.Com had someone sell him a free blog that looked like a good value. It was bundled with other services, so it did not look like a scam. The creators of this blog generator may not have even known they were selling year old bananas, but they were.  Here are my comments to Dr. Kent about what is happening with his free blog.

I would take down your blog ASAP or ALL links to DRKENT or any other site you want to rank well. This is a clone site as you mentioned that I did not know until your email –

Google penalizes links from this site, since it is the equivalent of spamming,  since there are thousands of copies of the site. When I copy your 1^st sentences into Google search it returns:

Results 1 – 100 of about 5,320 for “I can’t believe how much my low back hurts! I don’t know if I can go to work with it like this!” Does this sound familiar? (0.32 seconds)

Over time, Google learned that real content seldom has the same sentences as other sites. Even if they are quoting the president, there are enough other analysis or comments that make the page unique. But if it is the exact same words, then Google interprets all the sources as junk. Additionally, if those sites are junk, then all sites they recommend are junk. Basically if you hang around criminals, statistically you are a criminals. Of course that leaves an interesting situation for Police and the FBI, but there are a few dozen TV shows and hundreds of movies and books exploring that correlation. So if you have ‘cheap, duplicate content’ pointing at your site, then you probably don’t have quality content on your site. While Google cannot really read (understand what you are really intending to communicate), it can statistically analyze what you have shared. It knows that if your friends are bad, then there is a greater chance you are bad. Just like a background check by the FBI.

From Google’s own blog at

• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you’re scraping content (automatically copying the ‘good’ parts) from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines:

• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid… “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

• http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359

In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.

I guess as a way to ‘prove’ that the process works, using the scientific method – test and see the results. It is not truly following the scientific method, but as an experiment it has greater value then just being a thought experiment so often used as truth on the Internet:

• When I search for ‘back pain’, none of the 5,320 cloned blogs show up in the top 200 listings.
• When I search for ‘lost work time’, none of the 5,320 blogs show up in the top 200 listings except for http://www.drlarrycimpermanblog.com/wp/2009/08/05/have-you-lost-work-time-because-of-your-back-pain/ who they changed his title tag and page name explicitly to include ‘lost work time’.  It appears that he was the 1^st one they did with the new format on August 5 out of about 70, so he got a higher listing. The other 5,320 including you – lose.  Google will sometimes rank the 1^st site it finds, and then count the rest as duplicates. So yes you can game the system, but it may be as much effort as just following the rules appropriately.

When I search for ‘Neck and Arm Pain – The Herniated Disk?’ – the title and heading of another page – one site gets listed in the top 200 at 12 or on the second page for most searchers (click through rate on page 2 is about 1% of being in the top 3, so unless it is a high volume search term, useless) – http://instantchiroblogs.com/wp/2009/05/31/neck-and-arm-pain-%E2%80%93-the-herniated-disk/ Ben’s page may have been a test or a mistake, since it has the extra characters in the page name, and his page does not have an address or phone number on it – probably making it unique.

So the moral of the story is check to see if your free website is worth taking. It may even be costing you (extra calories or wasted time) in ways you do not even know. Typically to give something away free it needs to be lower quality. In the world of the Internet, quality is easier then ever to determine with just a few clicks by human or less effort by computers.