I know one thing that I deal with all the time is duplicate content penalties. If you do even basic forms of blackhat you’re heard of automation of blogs, scraping content, RSS feed’s and the like. Everyone with half a brain cell knows that there are duplicate content penalties in Goog’s algorithm that prevent scraper sites from gaining too well of ranks. But the real question is, to what severity does Google evaluate your content as “duplicate”?

A while ago (we’re talking about 2 years out) when I was just getting started in Blackhat SEO, Brad101 from WF introduced me to something that I like to call the 30% rule. He taught me that if 30% of the content on the page is unique, that you should pass most of the duplicate content penalties. At first this made a little sense but not enough to try, then I started to dig a little deeper. How exactly do news sites get away with it? Most of news sites is duplicate content anyway. Is it a per-domain uniqueness factor? If so, the 30% rule would make it work great! What if it was a per-page factor (which there’s enough proof already that this is most likely the case) – in which the 30% would work great as well again!

Once again, if duplicate content was so harsh that it was per paragraph or something – then news sites would be penalized all over. A lot of people would read that and say “but usually the backlink back to the author clears penalties” – ta-da! Think about that. Could that possibly be why autoblogs work so well *gasp*? If you post duplicate content and link back to the author, most of the time it’s a win/win. The author is -usually- happy due to a backlink, you’re happy because you may actually rank with your authority over the original site, and you can do this on mass quantities.

There’s a few tricks and tips you’ll find out as you mess more and more with these. One of the things that I’ve found quite interesting is that links themselves count as content, yet don’t have duplicate content penalties. I’m not obviously 100% sure on that one, but my sites wouldn’t be doing so well otherwise. If you read my EPN experiment I was able to send around 55,000 total users from Google to Ebay Partner Network via my splogs. This was actually click thru’s to EPN, not just to my sites. Probably on my sites alone I pulled a little over 100,000 uniques/month which equates to almost 3500 uniques/day. Not bad for a total setup time of a little under an hour, huh?

Don’t always assume that Google is going to fuck you. You shouldn’t be afraid of the Algorithm, you should be afraid of the manual reviews. This is just my opinion, of course – Google is getting smarter by the day. Have fun, and try to stay ahead of the curve!