I'm seeing something very odd and was hoping someone could shed some light on it for me. I started a Wordpress blog a few weeks ago. All of my blog posts have been getting indexed by Google, usually within minutes after I post them. Last week I had a post that didn't get indexed and I've been trying to figure out why. It was an article that I outsourced at O-Desk. Just out of curiousity, I ran a check with a Copyscape tool that checks for duplicate content. It came up with eight results. The first one that I clicked on is here: http://www.copyscape.com/view.php?o...s.com/removing-ovarian-cysts/&w=26&c=&i=1&r=8 The only duplicate content I see from my site is my affiliate disclosure. Can't remember where I got this disclosure from but I'm sure I copied it for the most part. Could that be causing problems for me? Secondly, if you'll notice, in a couple of spots under a "Popular Searches" heading, there's something very strange in there. (It's the part that's all in blue) It says: http://ovarian-cysts-treatments.com/removing-ovarian-cysts is using domain redirects to cloak affiliate links against Google policy. The first part of that is my blog post that didn't get indexed -- and I am using domain redirects to cloak my affiliate links. I always have used domain redirects and have always been told it's fine. Now I'm wondering, is it somehow against Google policy? Do you have any idea what I'm looking at here? I'm really confused so any insight would be great. Thanks, Lynda
Now I'm more confused than ever. Every single training program I've been through talks about how important it is to cloak your affiliate links -- and practically every affiliate site I see -- even the large, high-ranking sites -- are cloaking their affiliate links. What am I missing here? To clarify, I am cloaking my affiliate links by redirecting through a domain that I have purchased from Godaddy to be used for that specific purpose so that when someone places their cursor over my link, they see XYZWEBSITE.info rather than aaaa.bbbb.hop.clickbank.net. So this is illegal or against Google's TOS? Thanks
The cloaking on affiliate link is not against Google as long as the cloak is not a Spam attempt purpose. However, the main problem about your content ratio between the copied one and original unique. It seems most part of your website, 80% may be, are content from other peoples and not your own.
That isn't possible. This is all original content that I wrote myself, with the exception of the last two articles that I outsourced at O-Desk. The content that it's showing as being duplicated is from my affiliate disclaimer. It's not showing any of the content from the actual blog post itself as being duplicated. Unless I'm reading something incorrectly. Where are you seeing the 80 percent and where is my actual blog content showing up somewhere else? I really am trying to understand this. Thanks
You should probably put a rel=nofollow attribute on all you site pages that shouldn't be indexed. For example, you would want your site map and article titles to be dofollow links, but not your privacy policy, disclaimers, terms of use, etc.
Google loves original content and penalizes anything that is duplicate. Good fresh content holds a ton of weight with them.
Cloaking is a no-no. But what some people call 'link cloaking' is not cloaking, it's just a link redirect using htaccess, a php script or some such. Link redirecting is fine w/google. But I think it's benefits are overrated and I usually avoid doing it. Google can tell where your links go, whether you redirect them, nofollow them, whatever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking