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Great answer. thank you !

It is pointing to the other server now. We have it blocked from indexing on that end, just wanted to make sure that was enough.

Great feedback folks. Using Competitors names Is furthest from my mind. I prefer to focus on getting good Organic Search Traffic by ethical means. I was surprised when I came across this issue, because of who's doing it (a major player) and because it's a recent enough tactic of theirs, so I decided to ask for a second opinion. Thanks for these great answers Chris

Thank you Calin! Great answer!

Understand what you mean - to be very honest I don't think that this content snippet is generating duplicate content. However, I don't really understand the mechanism: https://www.zenory.com/horoscopes/taurus/day -> I would expect to find the daily horoscope for Taurus - when I click on Capricorn I would expect to go to https://www.zenory.com/horoscopes/capricorn/day - however I remain on the same page & the horoscope is shown in a lightbox. I would rather put it on a separate page (if all horoscopes of all signs are present in the HTML of one sign these pages become quite similar when you look at the source code.  Sounds a bit confusing, but I hope you get what I mean. rgds, Dirk

Ok here is how I will respond to this question. There are tons of signal that Google uses in order to rank a website against a query. CTR can be one of them but I see two problems here: Bounce rate. The bounce rate of the traffic will be high and this might give Google a hint that the website is getting a fake or unrealistic traffic. Amount of traffic from one source. The website that you are going to use will send the direct traffic or referral traffic from multiple (yet) limited sources and I am sure none of them will be reputable in the eye of Google which again make the case suspicious. We might see an increase in rankings in the beginning but it might fall down again in weeks of time so I guess for long term, this idea is a waste, plus this can hurt you as well. Now, I will move to the EGOL’s idea of how you should be working instead. I think the better idea is to work on legit ideas that give a real boost to your website rankings will help in the longer run and make you a brand which otherwise is not possible. Hope this helps!

Hi, For these type of questions - I fear you will only get very generic answers. Good starting points would be to study: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo https://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank & implement what is listed there. Other useful resources are listed here: https://moz.com/academy In general, put yourself in the mind of your target audience: what are they looking for what is the information they need how can your content / product help them in fulfilling that need Check the competition: who are your competitors - what are they doing? How can you improve what they are doing? If you encounter specific questions or issues you can post them here - the more specific the question is the better the answer (in general) Good luck, Dirk

Hey Matt, I'm not sure without researching if Blogspot has this, but one thing you might want to consider is a cross-domain canonical tag. Dr Pete has done a few great posts on the different was to use rel="canonical" that might apply in your situation. See http://moz.com/blog/6-extreme-canonical-tricks and http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions Hope that gets you started!

Thanks for your response Patrick! This has helped alot!!! So clear! Thanks for going into more details about the canonical tags - as this part was confusing! lol Thanks I have set it to www as the preferred With regards to the canonical tags - should I use this for ALL pages? or just the category pages? Or just pages I feel have similar content? Would it be just safe to add it to every page?

WOW thanks again Dirk, your feedback is beyond! Thanks for informing me of these changes and sending me those links! I will work on getting the above sorted asap with my developer Cheers for all your help!!!! Justin

Hi all, Thanks for the responses & feedback. Alan, in this example, the fresh content would be relevant. Of course there are search queries that don't need freshness or updates, but I would argue most do need updates / freshness (even the ones we think we know the answer to over time). Once again, the conversation is not about RANKING for that page but about HELPING the domain achieve "freshness & relevance" around a topic with that duplicate content. Would love to see others chime in. Thanks, Cole

so my guess is it is still coming from the referral spam because once Google or Moz any crawler that a tool that can assimilate keywords with inbound links anchor text and context it is normally a sign of referral spam. Hopefully we're not into a new era of something new. Try blocking everything via analytics and a WAF  I recommend  Incapsula,  Distill Networks & Sucuri WAF Sucuri is awesome And only $9 a Month https://sucuri.net/website-firewall/ I Hope this helps, Tom

Hi Dirk, After contacting Google by phone and mail, filing a few more spam reports and refreshing textual content, we got our results back and traffic/revenue has grown since. We are very happy, and no other pages got attacked (yet). Thanks for your help. Marcel

Glad it was useful!

This is a very interesting topic and as always we have no proof of the consequences from Google. I was always under the impression that should a page be seen as a replica of another page then the older page would rank higher in the SERPS. I was also under the impression that should duplicate content be discovered by Google that page would be flagged and penalized? I'm subject to correction because, as I said, there is no definitive proof relating to this at all.

Thanks for the confirmation Richard!

Hi Al, I'm sorry - I don't have any personal experience with Fiverr that I can speak from. Personally, I would recommend that if you're hiring someone, you consider contacting some of the Local SEOs who participated in the last Local Search Ranking Factors study (http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors). Look at the box on the right side labeled Contributors. Pretty much anyone on that list is likely to be worth speaking to about your needs and their skills. Hope that idea helps! P.S. sorry about the wonky formatting of this response - we're having a little issue with this today

Hi there I would say that most of this list still stands. A couple of things I would point out: Anchor text - Try and steer clear of exact match anchor text. It can trip spam filters if you have too much of that going on in your backlink profile. Try to make more use of branded anchor text. You can read more here. nofollow links - Don't disregard links because they are nofollow. They can be valuable and important, especially if that link is relevant to your business and helps expands your visibility to your audience. There's a great article here about nofollow. PageRank - Google doesn't update this metric anymore. You can read more here. There are metrics elsewhere via OSE and more below that I list that you can find just as useful. All in all - the best way to define a bad link is to use your own intuition and common sense: Does this link help my website? Is this link relevant to my website? Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it? Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website? If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority, Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy? Truthfully though, if you're asking that many questions about a link and still going, it's probably not a good link. A good link, in my opinion, is one when you see it, you just know that's a link that you want and that you can greatly benefit from with no hidden or false intentions. No need for tools - unless it's citation building like Moz Local or Whitespark. Those can be helpful! This list from Rand is still helpful though and interesting. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Thanks Christina!!! Appreciate your feedback!

Check with ahrefs or majestic, check the links manually or using a tool like link detox and then you'll know what needs to be done.