Hello Clay ~
I can certainly understand your concern about the consequences of
50-100 sites with identical content incorporating your book as if it
were a part of the site.
A valid question is whether or not, or at what point, might those
sites be considered the equivalent of search engine spam - and to
whose detriment?
=========================
What Google Says
=========================
Google offers a spam reporting tool on its "More Google: Search
Quality and Your Feedback", emphasizing that "Google strives to return
the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we
encourage website managers to make their content straightforward and
easily understood by both users and search engines alike.
Unfortunately, not all websites have our users' best interests at
heart."
- ://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Google uses those reports to either improve the quality of its site
search returns, or in particularly egregious cases of deception, will
remove those pages from the index entirely.
What is interesting to note is there is a check box for "Duplicate
site or pages". A natural question should be how those pages
CenterSite is proposing will effect your own pages on mentalhelp.net.
Additionally, Google's Webmaster Guidelines specifically state, "...
we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality
Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead
to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site
has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com
or on any of Google's partner sites."
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
Under the mentioned "Quality Guidelines - Specific Recommendations",
there is a specific mention of multiple domains with the same content:
"Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:
* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don't send automated queries to Google.
* Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
* Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with
substantially duplicate content.
* Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or
other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs
with little or no original content."
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
Obviously, there is reason for concern with regard to your own site if
every one of those domains is going to contain the same content.
Let's take a look at how your site looks to Google currently.
=========================
Your Site's PageRank
and Links to Your Site
=========================
Using the Google Toolbar, your site currently has a PageRank of 6/10 -
which is a respectable PageRank.
[Note: The Google Toolbar can be downloaded at
http://toolbar.google.com and installed on a Windows-based computer if
you use Internet Explorer as your browser]
Since Google's order of results is automatically determined by more
than 100 factors, including its PageRank algorithm, a higher PageRank
such as 6/10 is to your advantage in being found under the terms you
want searchers to find you.
Google's Page Rank technology is explained on "Our Search: Google
Technology", here:
- ://www.google.com/technology/index.html
And the importance of links TO your site is discussed on Google's site
in "Submitting Your Site", stating, "The best way to ensure Google
finds your site is for your page to be linked from lots of pages on
other sites. Google's robots jump from page to page on the Web via
hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is
that we'll find you quickly."
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html#A2
There are other resources as well, which contain reliable information
about the relevant links to your site - as opposed to the multiple
pages containing the same content and/or cookie cutter sites.
Some of those sources are Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch
- http://www.searchenginewatch.com
and the discussions, particularly Google News, on Webmaster World
- http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/
Please remember, though, that only Google knows the very specific
information about their algorithms, and they're not going to reveal
much about them, except to the extent listed on their Technology Page.
- ://www.google.com/technology/index.html
Even we Google Answers Researchers are not privy to the inner workings
of Google, and we do not have any insider information with regard to
Google's search engine results. The closest you may come to an
"official" stance from Google are those comments supplied by GoogleGuy
(a Google employee) who does comment in some threads in Webmaster
World (link above).
What I find interesting about your own page is that if we perform a
search for your specific section of mentalhelp.net, that is, for
"www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/" (without the quotation marks), we get
the following results:
"Psychological Self-Help - Table of Contents
ง. Search Psych Self Help. ง. ...
Description: A free, online self-help book on depression,
anxiety, relationships, sex, and well-being.
Category: Shopping > Publications > ... > Self Help >
Specific Titles
Google can show you the following information for this URL:
* Show Google's cache of www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/
* Find web pages that are similar to
www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/
* Find web pages that link to www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/
* Find web pages that contain the term
"www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/"
(From Google Search Results)
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=www.mentalhelp.net%2Fpsyhelp%2F&btnG=Google+Search
The first line above is the table of contents to your actual website.
The "Category: Shopping > ..." is the listing in Google's Directory,
which is fed by the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org).
Clicking on the link from "Find web pages that link to ...", though,
produces 420 links:
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=link:dRCzedPVlPQJ:mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/
Those links include internal links on the mentalhelp.net site which
refer to your book as well as individual chapters and pages within
your book.
On the other hand, using Google's link:tool - that is, putting "link:
www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/" in the Google search box - produces only
28 results, and only *ONE* of those are from either mentalhelp.net or
CenterSite - the Chapter 10 download ... and that was on the last
page.
You mentioned youthandfamilies.org/psyhelp/; and CenterSite mentions
another organization, Bridgeway Center (www.bridgewaycenter.org) who
also has a /psyhelp/ section identical to yours. I found the Bridgeway
Center on the CenterSite information page here:
- www.bridgewaycenter.org/psyhelp/
Both of those sites have a PageRank of 0. And they do not 'appear' to
actually link to your book on the mentalhelp.net.
I tried searching for other organizations similar to
youthandfamilies.org/psyhelp, using the following search terms from
your book:
* WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGICAL SELF-HELP?
* ISBN 1-890873-00-4
* forces and laws of nature that support life and evolution
(from the acknowledgements)
and even
* /psyhelp/chap11/
There are lots of links to those pages, either from sites referring to
your book or from the mentalhelp.net sites. None that I could find
from either the Youth and Families or Bridgeway Center domains.
And remembering that there are a lot of affiliate sites out there that
are cookie cutter / identical sites to their affiliate association, I
searched every place I could to find a definitive answer to your
question.
On Google's search, I tried
* Google + affiliate sites
* Google + spam
* search engines PLUS affiliate sites
* search engines PLUS spam
* search engine spam
I searched for similar terms on
* Webmaster World
- http://www.webmasterworld.com
* Search Engine Watch
- http://searchenginewatch.com
* SEO Chat
- http://www.seochat.com/
* Search Engine Secrets
- http://www.search-engine-secrets.net
* Search Engine Guide
- http://www.searchengineguide.com
After looking through their sites and the search engine results on
"search engine spam", there are a lot of obvious 'spamming' behavior,
such as stuffing metatags, tricks with hidden text and doorway pages,
that have been penalized by search engines.
When we get to sites with identical content, it gets a bit harder to
definitively state sites are penalized for that. It has been noted
that a lot of Affiliate sites are not listed in the search engines.
Whether this is due to the fact they're just a cookie cutter site or
that there are no links TO those sites is hard to determine.
The only real mention I have seen of the type of sites you are asking
about are references to the fact that Google says "don't do it".
In your own case, we can see that it hasn't hurt your situation - at
least not yet. You have both a respectable PageRank and important
links from relevant sites to your own. Of course, it's very hard to
find the other two sites, Youth and Families and Bridgeway Center, in
the search engines, and they certainly come nowhere near the
popularity your own site enjoys.
=========================
Summary
=========================
Google says don't do it.
I think it is safe to assume that if Google specifically mentions and
recommends against it, there is a reason for doing so. Even if they
may not be penalizing the practice now, there is no guarantee they
won't do so in the future. Why take the chance?
The practice does not seem to have helped either of the two sites
which I could find that used that method - I could find neither of
them in search engine results, and their PageRank is 0/10.
There are more acceptable ways to link to your book from any of the
sites CenterSite may create, just by creating a hyperlink, instead of
having the book appear as a part of those sites. Such a hyperlink is
better than trying to include it on a cookie cutter site, which may
ultimately be more harmful than helpful.
Current hyperlinks from sites to your book hasn't hurt those who link
in that manner, and it can only be more beneficial to you AND to
mentalhelp.net on whose site your book currently resides.
Thank you, Clay, for the opportunity to tackle this challenging
question. I would have liked to deliver a definitive answer that
clearly said, one way or the other, whether this is a good idea.
Perhaps the lack of evidence speaks more than we realize.
Best regards,
Serenata |
