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I run about 10 sites and most of them seemed to fall foul of the penguin update and even though I have never sought inorganic links I have been frantically searching for a link based answer since April.

However since asking a question here I have been pointed in another direction by one of your contributors. It seems At least 6 of my sites have duplicate content issues.

If you search Google for "We have selected nearly 200 pictures of short haircuts and hair styles in 16 galleries" which is the first bit of text from the site short-hairstyles.com about 30000 results appear. I don't know where they're from nor why anyone would want to do this. I presume its automated since there is so much of it.

I have decided to redo the content. So I guess (hope) at some point in the future the duplicate nature will be flushed from Google's index?

But how do I prevent it happening again? It's impractical to redo the content every month or so.

For example if you search for "This facility is written in Flash to use it you need to have Flash installed." from another of my sites that I coincidently uploaded a new page to a couple of days ago, only the duplicate content shows up not my original site. So whoever is doing this is finding new stuff on my site and getting it indexed on google before even google sees it on my site!

Thanks,

Ian

OK, thank you EGOL.

I clearly have content duplication issues on many of my sites which I'll address by changing said content and hopefully that problem will go away or at least reduce. How long does that take?

The linkback issue. Is it an issue? I originally assumed going by the date my problems were solely due to Penguin and therefore linkback related. Should I, in the light of this other content problem, assume that the linkback issue isn't a problem or should I still consider using the disavowel tool?

Ian

Hi EGOL

Thanks for that. Yes most of my sites seem to have this but they copied me! Do I have to change everything? Is it as simple as just changing the content for the pages affected or is the damage done? Is there a way of preventing this?

Google really penalises sites because people copy them?

"Sites with malware problems are usually dropped from the SERPs and sites linking to them are often harmed." sorry I don't understand this bit, I don't link to them.

Ian

Hello everyone,

I run about 10 sites and pretty much every single one got hit by Penguin (the traffic plummeted on 24th April). I have never done reciprocal links (except 1 domain upto 2005 or so), I have never bought links, I have never spammed message boards or anything like that (except 1 different domain got hit by negative SEO by someone else) and I have never employed anyone to do any of the above. The way I have created sites for the last 10 years is to try to make them useful and let the links build naturally which more or less worked until April this year. I've been tearing my hair out ever since. The only thing you can say about all of them (apart from that I own them but I've been careful with whois etc) is that the link profile is 100% natural apart from the 2 provisos above.

Since April I've hired people but I'm down $20K but not any better in the rankings.

A few of the sites are:

short-hairstyles.com was number 1 for short hairstyles and short haircuts for years then Penguin came and its dropped off for both. It had 10000 or so spammy message board links posted by someone as negative seo I have got some removed but google webmaster tools still reports them as there. There are tentative signs of recovery (maybe) but no traffic increase.

1001-hairstyles.com has been there or there abouts for 10 years for the keyword hairstyles and hair styles until April. A site ourlipsaresealed.skyblogs.be has 30000 links to it (there are only 40000 total) with the anchor text haarstijls which is dutch for hairstyles, I don't think its malicious just they set a template and do a new page every day and they also link in the same way to a competitor who wasn't affected. An seo firm have been working on this one for a few months, the traffic increased 50% a couple of weeks ago but bombed the day after to worse than before.

Prom-hairstyles.org when the same way as above in April. The only back link oddity is a site polyvore.com links to it about 400 times (out of 1000 or so total) they are using our pictures to sell their prom dresses (with out permission) but mostly deep link.

Most of the other sites went in a similar way but have no obvious backlink anomalies. Do I use the link disavowel tool? I am a bit wary of it because if you watch matt cutts video he keeps reiterating that the tool is for people who have used dodgy link practises in the past and want to do a clean up but that isn't me so am I owning up to something I haven't done by using it?

Are the search results as strange in everybody's niche? In mine there is some real dross as well as loads of pinterest and other user generated stuff.

Sorry to go on for so long and thanks for getting this far.

Ian