Let’s take a closer look at Google’s handling of content, shall we?

One of the most important steps in improving your site’s ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content.

However, some webmasters attempt to improve their page’s ranking and attract visitors by creating pages with many words but little or no authentic content. Google will take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other auto-generated pages that don’t add any value to users. Examples include:

I do not want to discourage you from your work as an affiliate! Most of you do a great job of driving traffic to your affiliate sites. You know what it takes to draw your reader in and funnel them through your links.

But, with Google, many of you are walking a fine line here. Google will easily penalize you for failing to add value to its searches, resulting in a serious loss of income potential on your part.

There is no problem in being an affiliate as long as you create some added value for your users and produce valuable content that gives a user a reason to visit your site. For example, you could create product reviews, ratings, and product comparisons.

Sometimes, even Google gets it wrong. 

Perhaps this portion of this post will be encouraging to the content thief. That is not our goal. But, there has been a trend online from those who manage their prime keywords that some of the scraped material is ranking higher in searches than the original content.

Because of that occasional miscalculation on Google’s part, the content thieves keep hope alive – especially with terms that are more frequently searched.

Want an example? Click the image below to expand:

 

That’s your call. But, you are not anonymous.

Don’t allow for your best content to be hidden on Google’s last page buried with the omitted results!

At Source Blogger, our success is based on yours. Our target audience is the demanding reader who only reads the most informative, relevant, and intelligent content. Our target audience is you.

We are proud of growing and cultivating the Source Blogger community. We love the interaction and expertise that they bring to each new article we publish (See comments of past articles).

We want you to be part of this experience. Join Source Blogger.

There have been some great blogs, past and present, that have been created to help bloggers in their blogging, but none with the style and insight of a Source Blogger.

Our goal was to take this niche/category and completely “kick the doors in.” The Source Blogger community will not stop until you reach your goal and Source Blogger becomes the most recognized blog in the world. Is that too lofty of an expectation on our part? Why?

We’re still a new blog at under 5 months, but slowly winning over the hearts and minds of the vast blogging community everyday. Click here to join the Source Blogger community.

In our next installment of “Content Theft” Week, we’re going to keep it close to Google. The more you understand about Google, the better you will be at improving the search results of your own blog’s content.

If you truly want to create a buzz in the blogosphere and convert (and maintain) the greatest number of subscribers, it will be through your unique writing style.Your personality and character must be clearly reflected in your content.

That is your advantage. Use it. You’re not here to “fit in” or conform. So what if the trend says to use a the standard white/blue/black WordPress Thesis Theme, remove all advertising, and blog in a cold, impersonal, and distance manner. It doesn’t have to be your approach. Does it?  

 What are you so afraid of? We believe in you. The only thing keeping you from the A-List is you.

Think of yourself as the new “Jim Cramer of the blogging community”. Jim Cramer is just like many of the thousands of hedge fund managers on Wall St., but he knows to entertain and engage his viewers. He knew when he parted ways with Larry Kudlow to create his own show, the type of persona it would take to create something special. He created Mad Money (airs nightly on CNBC).

Now am I telling you to be as “over-the-top” as he has been? No. Just merely gauge how viewers interact with him. And strive to incorporate that in your blog.

Does that mean the transition will be smooth for you? Of course it won’t. Commentators will write in with very vicious and hurtful comments to undermine your efforts. If you truly believe you have unique contribution to readers, you deserve the revenue and notoriety that comes along with it. And you should not be so impacted by a few, anonymous comments. Or other bloggers’ views on how you should blog.

Blogging is about fire. Blogging is about passion. Blogging is about your personal journey. Blogging is about creativity. Blogging is about your expression – without limits.

Blogging can also be an overwhelming task to undertake between your career, your spouse, continuing your education, and pursuing opportunities in the stock market and your small business. (Ok, most of that was catered around Source Blogger’s situation – laughs).

What drives Source Blogger is the input and feedback from the growing Source Blogger community. This has truly been a special experience for us here at Source Blogger. Whatever level of achievement we have been fortunate to accomplish in our short, 4.5 months is because of sincerity and interest in elevating your blogging ability.

We knew that Source Blogger had to be well-written, intelligent, inspiring, relevant…and most of all entertaining.

Ok, many of you oversee blogs that are not in the same category/niche as we are, but these same principles still apply.

“Source Blogger, is it really that easy to network with my readers and other bloggers? How? 

Not only is it easy, it is a very rewarding aspect to what we do as bloggers. Recognize and appreciate the time readers take to respond to your articles. We truly enjoy hearing from the Source Blogger community. Sure they can be impatient and demanding, but they motivate us to continue to improve. We appreciate that. It drives us to please them.

Like animals and babies, readers and other bloggers can sense when your intentions are pure and unselfish.

You will never truly be successful in blogging, until you stop trying to take advantage of each of the hundreds of thousand of people your blog will reach in it’s lifetime. Instead of trying to create “multiple streams of blog income,” work on building lasting, giving relationships first. – Source Blogger

We hope this article has caused to reflect on your own online identity. Who are you? The ultimate goal is to “brand yourself” as a credible source of information and entertainment. No one will ever buy a thing from you otherwise. Help them to believe in you as we do.

The “Duplicate Content Penalty.” It sounds like some complex legal term, doesn’t it? It’s consequences may be just as serious to you as a blogger. This penalty is applied by Google and possibly other search engines when content found on your blog/website is reproduced from another site/blog.

The best advice I can give you is to maintain your blog’s creative expression and independence, but do it in a way that does not conflict with Google Search (or Google AdSense).

Since the inception of the World Wide Web, it has been targeted by every slick internet marketer, social media marketer, schemer, scammer, splogger, and spammer. It’s a tense ongoing battle by search engines (Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, and Ask) to provide the most relevant, informative results from their keyword searches.

In the past, receiving high search rank (or SERP Rank) was as easy as duplicating keywords or duplicating content. Search engines have become more dynamic preventing this from occurring, say, outside of a few odd exceptions.  

Affiliate Sites

As with many of the affiliate sites online, once you register with them, set up your profile, and review what type of advertising strategies you intend to incorporate, in their resources section there are (typically WordPress-friendly) template pages that can be downloaded and reconstructed under your new URL. If there were 2-3 of you, it would be competitive. But imagine hundreds of affiliates doing the same thing! Now when you perform a keyword search with terms directly related to the topic of thses template pages, you could see hundreds of other sites with content completely identical in nature.

In our last article, How Google Punishes The Content Thieves! , we discussed affiliate sites and how Google feels that these sites offer little-to-no value to the reader.

We need to be clear here. At Source Blogger, we are 100% supportive of our fellow affiliate marketers. We feel that any site that mobilizes a network of other participants, delivering more traffic to a site and driving higher sales of a product, is an incredible concept.

But, obviously, your effectiveness is undermined when duplicate content is omitted from Google Search results.

If you have been blogging for any length of time, it can be a challenge to consistently provide quality for your readers. Often, when doing research of a topic, there are typically between 1-5 articles that are already receiving high Search Rank and are well written.

For many bloggers, they cave in to the temptation to copy someone else’s body of work.

What is the likelihood that a reader will discover you committed plagiarism? Not very likely. But, it has happened. I have seen this occur.

Just recently, a very well-known blog in the Blogging Resources section of Entrecard, with an Alexa Rank of around 23k, (probably the highest Alexa Rank of the blogs on Entrecard), copied an article, word for word, from Darren Rowse of ProBlogger. The article’s title was something like how to make $30,000 a year as a blogger. (It’s typical for many bloggers to draw you in with a big, bold “static headline” and then disappoint with some recycled, generic, generalized content. – sorry Darren!) Anyway, the Entrecard Blogger copied it word for word. And to make matters worse, actually commented on behalf of ProBlogger in the comments section under the post as Mr. ProBlogger himself. Can you believe that guy? Darren was going crazy on Twitter, tweeting on the whole situation.  We got a good chuckle out of that! (ssshh!)

In closing, duplicate content will do very little to enhance your online credibility and identity. Should you avoid all duplicate content completely? Of course not! So, how much duplicate is acceptable? You’ll have to determine that on your own.

In the final installment of “Content Theft” Week on Source Blogger, we were approached by a guest blogger about sharing his methods of stealing content. You should get a lot of the next article aptly entitled: “The Shocking Confessions of a Real Content Thief”

Welcome back to Source Blogger. I want to thank each and every member of the Source Blogger community for their gracious support during 2009. We could not have done it without you! It has been a pleasure to become your friend and serve you.

2010 will be another exciting year for Source Blogger. Wait until you see what we have in store for you! You may not have the tendency to follow many blogs. Perhaps you feel that many blogs have a short shelf life and content can be inconsistent. We agree! Which is why Source Blogger was created. If you are new to Source Blogger, we want to help you become a more successful blogger. We’re determined to make this happen! So, at least consider becoming a new member of the growing, Source Blogger community, won’t you? Give us 30 days. We’ll gladly prove it to you.

For our final article of 2009, we’re going to leave you with the sobering: Why You Should Not Become A Blogger -The Truth About Blogging.

Source Blogger, wait, I thought you were encouraging and supportive of new bloggers? How long did you think we were going to read your blog and not be inspired to start putting your advice to good use?We appreciate the sentiment. And please don’t be fooled by the article’s title. Our goal is to try and prepare you for entering the blogosphere.

Unlike other sources online, who promise you vast sources of wealth and fame within days or weeks of launching a blog, we feel obligated to share with you the stark realities of what you will face as a new blogger.Source Blogger, this is not helping!

It will. relax. We feel that the more you are informed of what you will endure in your first year, the least of a likelihood you will become frustrated and abandon your blog.

A fresh, sexy WordPress theme can run you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars over its lifetime, considering the price many companies offer to support you in mobilizing these complex, attractive themes. Not to mention the price of hosting your blog.

The trend in blogging is towards cleaner, less obtrusive themes. Your goal here is to become a substitute for the online news reader. As both print media (newspaper, magazines) and their related online content struggles for viability, why not appear in a manner that is similar, in form, to theirs? Your blog is more than capable of becoming a “satisfying source of media, can’t it?” We have no doubt you could be just as competitive.

Like any business, a significant raising and deployment of capital is typically followed by a period of working to recapture the initial investment.

As a new blogger, can you accurately predict when you will recoup these initial costs? Of course not. Blogging is a new arena for you. Have you seen the stats? Even we were shocked to read that 80% of blogs were abandoned after their first 3 months!

If you are uncertain about how money bloggers make online, you must read this!  How Much Money Do Bloggers Make Blogging?

The adage, “you have to spend money to make money” is just as true in blogging. There are hundreds of advertisers online, all with varying degrees of reward. Conventional methods of marketing and promotion may not begin to yield any measurable methods for years.

As your blog increases in popularity, so does the responsibility to manage it. It’s that simple. Your blog is not a newsletter. You have a target market (hopefully) that you should be directing your contend towards.

Creating an online identity, branding your blog’s concept, and interacting with other bloggers and readers among numerous blogging communities and social media avenues, will cost you many days of lost sleep and time away from your family.

As you amass more and more blog followers, the demand for more concise, relevant, and dynamic content can be overwhelming. Blog traffic can be very critical of what you provide to them. Have you planned on writing hundreds, if not thousands of articles on your blog’s topic? ii.) Technical Problems

Difficult challenges will eventually arise. Many of these occurrences can cripple your blog and/or make it unavailable. From analyzing what went wrong, to finding the best outlet to receive the best answer on your unique problem, may take some serious time. Time that impacts your subscribers and present blog traffic. How are you going to handle this?

How will readers find your blog? Blog traffic is not based on a blog’s quality, it’s based on the effort a blog’s author makes in regards to both organic and inorganic strategies for driving traffic. You will be shocked at the number of followers other blogs in your category/niche have. Your blog is more attractive and has better content. But, how will you capture the audience you wish to deliver to your blog.

One method will be to drive organic traffic to your site via search engines. In order for this to happen, you have no choice but to convert your writing style in a fashion that appeals to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.

SEO is a complex science that requires a great deal of experimentation to perfect. And even then, results are not always guaranteed.

You can expect to blog in near obscurity in your first year. And after reading How Much Money Do Bloggers Make Blogging?, you know what to expect in regards to revenue.

It will take at least six to nine months before your blog articles are able to saturate into search engine results pages (SERPs) with any regularity.

Happy Blogging?!