Duplicate exact match domains flagged by google - need help reinclusion

[ilyaelbert]

Okay I admit, I've been naughty....I have 270+ domains that are all exact match for city+keyword and have built tons of back links to all of them. I reaped the benefits....and now google has found my duplicate templates and flagged them all down. Question is, how to get the reincluded quickly?

Do you guys think converting a site to a basic wordpress template and then simply using 275 different templates and begging applying each site manually would do it, or do you recommend.

1. create a unique site template for each site

2. create unique content

any other advice for getting reincluded? Aside from owning up and saying, "hey i used the same template for all the sites, and I have created new templates and unique content, so please let me back".

[NextDigital51]

Okay, first of all, I don't think penaltyis caused by the duplicate templates (just think of all the wordpress sites using the same template!!)

Possible reasons for the penalty:

• Duplicate content (spin articles much?)
• Low quality links (link farms? paid links?)

The reasons above might all contributes to the reason why your sites are penalised.

From the sound of things, it seems like you are doing some black hat stuff here, milking adsense and not providing unique and useful content to users. I am afraid this would not be a quick fix, it's hard to justify how your 270+ domains will become relevant and helpful resources overnight!

[ilyaelbert]

Sorry if i didn't explain

the sites are all service business-related. THey're not ad-sense in any way. They all do haev 100% identical content except for some keyword replacement where the city keyword is. Each site is related to a different city,  for example plumber + los angeles, or plumber + new york.  Each site has a different phone number, so I AM servicing those areas, however my problem is the duplicate content. The link profiles are very different.

[rishil]

Sorry - I had to giggle when I first read your question

1. Google has made changes to algo that is finding a number of these sites , especially ones with dupe content

2. They are in the process of downgrading the value of exact match domains.

My advice? If you are adamant n getting these sites back up, take one - customise the template, make sure its not linked to or or linking to any of your others - rewrite the content and make it unique, and then send in a reinclusion request to google, outlining what you did and WHY you did it...

[VisualSense]

There's no need to worry about the templates... But your content sounds 99% dupe across all of your 270+ sites. I'd start with rewriting the pages for your best converting sites and take it one by one from there. Not sure if this is in fact a manual penalty, are your URLs still apearing in the SERPS when you search for them?

[dmac]

Google hates duplicate content, so much so that you will have problems with two urls, let alone 270 of them. Don't bother trying anything funny, like spinning the articles, at least for now. When you submit your site for re-inclusion it will be examined by humans, not robots. You need to have a good story and a nice clean site if you want to get back into the game. Being that your sites are 98 percent duplicate content, that really means you have only one, maybe two, websites at best. I would make 301 redirects from all your other websites to your best performing website. This will show google that you have solved your duplicate content problems while keeping all the links from the other sites. Good luck! dmac

[DGSEO]

Rishi -

Can you recommend a good resource that supports point number 2?  I'd love to learn more about what they are actually doing to downgrade exact match domains.

Thanks

[rishil]

They have been attacked time and time again - its not happened yet, and MC keeps saying they are looking at it. Quite a few took a bump when I put that comment out, but weeks later most were back in the index.

[Syed1]

Recommend the 2 points you mentioned. Of course, followed with a dose of good old backlinks and backed by some social signals as well.  Yes its more work but it will you see better ROI in the long run.

Also, echoing other users here, template is not an issue at all - its what you put on it - the content, titles and other meta tags that needs to be unique especially if you are a low-mid level authority. Very high level authority sites can get away with duplicate content as Google sometimes tends to blindly trust them over the original source.

[danrawk]

i would consider adding social features such as seo-able comments/forums/disqus etc. to help build each sites "local"ness in kw's. get each site as far away from the "template" mindset as you can.

in terms of "templates" keep in mind that google is not looking at template code for the most part. they're looking at the content (stuff in text) on your site and it's relevance.

i'd also consider shelving 260 of those domains, and making 10 really great sites.

best of luck!

[Svetoslav]

A while ago a business manager I work with purchased 30 exact match domains, willing to use them for "SEO purposes". I actually poked around for ideas here too. At the end I decided I can't use them at all and got them redirected. The advice I got here was to focus my effort on the main site. What I plan to use them for at this point is AdWords. I will try to boost the CTR. If that does nto work, I'm 301 tem to the main site again.

My plan is to grab the domains, put a canonical link element on the whole domain, since it will duplicate the main site. Since AdWords URLs tend to get pasted into forum threads, blog post and social networks, I'm kind of hoping for a collateral effect in terms of backlinks.

Even if you have your sites reincluded, there is no guarantee that they won't go down again pretty soon. This seems a short term strategy anyway. Get the good URLs redirected to you main site and focus your effort there.

[davidangotti]

You may have already seen this article from a few weeks back, but it is closely related to what you are thinking about doing with the domains:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2086693/Exact-Match-Domains-Can-Double-Clicks-on-PPC-Ads

Good luck!

[Svetoslav]

No, I haven't. Thanks for sharing, David! I guess I'm doing it first thing tomorrow.

[Netboost]

it is time for you to spin your content and try and make the sites distinct from each other. Try it then ping the sites. If nothing changes after a month you will have to write a love letter to google.

[NickEubanks]

IMHO this is absolutely a content issue - opposed to spinning the content my suggestion would be to spent a little bit of $$ on having unique articles written targeting your top-level head and body keywords on each domain. You can get unique articles created for as little as $3 each using Odesk, Guru, or similar services - at this point I think spinning the content is not a great approach as Google has already recorded that these sites contain duplicate content and have been flagged as such, spent the money on some real content, re-work your post and page titles to reflect the new unique content, re-generate your sitemaps to include the new unique titles, and then re-submit

[caneja]

Are all of the domains being hosted under the same IP or have the same WHOIS info?  If so then I suggest you use different hosting providers (hence difference IP's) and change up the whois info for each of the domains (you can even use private).

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Ilya,

It's been a few months since your original question. Are you still looking for some advice regarding this? Or do you have something you could share with us about what you did and let us know what we should do or not do if we're in a similar situation?

Thanks!

[DanLaBate]

Google beat up real estate sites for the same reason.  City + homes for sale type sites where all that changed was the city, especially where the sites would create mini fact pages for each city to try and pull rank for that area keyword search.

Too many sites have used this technique and the market is saturated with such low quality sites.  Niche directories focusing on one city are better, but you need to watch the boiler plate content and also the listings you have need to contribute more to the conversation that just name, address telephone like the yellow pages.

I doubt that Google is penalizing you for using the sale template, as mentioned so many sites use WordPress themes where the code structure is identical, and they are doing fine. I am curious if you are interlinking the websites.

Good content, usefulness and fresh contributions to the site will always be a good recipe.  Fix and request re-inclusion and your shouldn't have a problem.

[Thos003]

Guilty!... and it takes one to know one.

You may have little chance of redeeming those sites. 301 redirects seem to wipe the crap clean. So you get the traffic and some of the link juice.

Or...

Pass the website on. Give it to someone else... Change the registration.

..... As an added note, I once heard Matt Cutts say, "Why would you want to buy one of these (burned) sites? Why wouldn't you start over with a new site? Then at least you are at ground zero instead of in a hole."

[nyanainc]

Friend, dont spin or what ever, Create unique and useful content. Pandas crunch you...