The Duplicate Content Filter

Google dislikes presenting multiple search results that contain the same content. Instead, it decides which is the most authoritative original source of that content from all the duplicates it has in its index, and presents just that one. The rest are filtered into the supplementary index – all that extra content you can see when you see something like this at the end of your search results:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

An experiment to become the authority

I wanted to test the power of backlinks as an indicator of authority above all else. The outline of the experiment is straightforward:

1. Create a brand new website
2. Fill it with content that already exists on other, more established websites
3. Create back-links pointing to it
4. Do not market the site in any other way

I am not going to link to the site itself here, as I am now isolating it from normal, organic link targets to perform another experiment.

Content for the site was selected from some freely available PLR (Public Label Rights) articles which can be legally reproduced. Such articles are also generally already published elsewhere. In my case, a search for specific chunks of article texts showed most articles had already been published across 6-10 other websites, some new, some quite established.

Getting indexed

Adding a link to the footer of a very healthy blog got the brand new domain added to the Google index within 24 hours.

Building back-links

In addition to the main purpose of this test, I also used it to try out link building service Linkvana. A full review of my experience with Linkvana will be here soon, but in a nutsheell, it provides the ability to create unique backlinks from a plethora of specially managed blogs, but without the potentially damaging drawbacks of usinga link-farm.

Over a period of three weeks I used Linkvana exclusively to create just 15 back-links into the new content, both deep-linking and to the home page.

The outcome

After just a week of link-building, searching for specific chunks of my published PLR text returned my site at the top of the search results, with all the other pages containing the same PLR article, pushed into the supplemental index as duplicate content. This despite all the other sites having the advantage of greater domain age and having already published that content.

The conclusion

Duplicate content is one of the most discussed, and misunderstood, aspects of Google’s search alorhythm, but can be overcome with pure link bulding.

The number of quality links pointing at duplicate content, seems to be the primary metric for assessing that site’s authority. Of course, this assumption must be tempered against any existing authority held by other sites with the same content.