Google Doesn't Like Scraped Content - Who Knew? :)

I just finished doing my bi-monthly daily traffic report for all my sites. Aspkin.com is doing okay with about 736 visitors a day starting this month. I found that making the eBay forums private really slowed things down, all the way to around 500 visitors a day. So a few days ago I made the forums public again, and the numbers of visitors are starting to increase. Before the forums went public I was receiving around 1200 visitors a day to my blog and forum. Not so bad.

stats I also found that Google really doesn’t like scraped content. I’m not a big fan of it either but since I can’t possibly write all my own content, I have to find methods to feed my sites fresh content. Most of my sites have unique content, but there are a few I’ve been testing with different kinds of scraped content. My best sites, averaging 2-3 thousand visitors a day are custom made websites with 100% unique solid content. My worst sites have barley 10 visitors a day with 100% scrapped content using wordpress themes.

Google doesn’t necessarily care if you use the same platforms as others use (wordpress), but they seem to give you some sort of bonus if you use some unique scripts to handle your content. And also they don’t care much for scraped content; which I pretty much knew already, but had to test it out for my self.

blackhat I’m experimenting with RSS content with some sites, and I’m having good results. Some sites are staying the same traffic wise and others are increasing slightly; which is a good step away from ugly scraped content.

I also found that if you domain names have highly sought keywords in them, Google will look at these sites more often for spam, and if you’re using scraped content with these sites, Google won’t hesitate to ban you domain. I’ve had two AWESOME domain names banned for scraped content. I’m trying to get them back by using good content and high ranking inbound links, but time will tell. I was able to get one site back about 6 months ago, and now that site gives me around 400 unique visitors a day. Nice!

I’ve found that mixing up your content with some unique and scraped content works well. Especially if your scraped content is targeted to keywords you’re looking for. But scraped content websites all by it’s self doesn’t work.

One last thingâ€¦ using the same exact content in multiple sites doesn’t work either. I have 6 sites based on the same topic and using the same content. But only 2 or 3 of those sites get decent traffic. The other 3 gets crap for traffic! Just a heads up.