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Google Ranking Experiment....Makes No Sense

by Thack
13 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I will share my most recent experiment with you guys.

I have built over 100 sites....some winners....mostly losers, but I learn from each mistake I make. Recently I purchased a few adsense sites on Flippa and was able to look under the hood of each one to see what was working to make them rank. I spent 5 k on 6 sites.

So...using the methods, plugins, on page seo, from these sites I go and build 30 sites all in the same niche. Same, but slightly different. They are in a high cpc competitive niche and all average from 1000 to 14000 monthly US visits.

The sites all look the same. same theme, header, same sub titles, same flow, same plugins, same amount of images and content.

One of the sites landed on the first page in week two. It was number 3 by week four, and at week six it is holding at number one. The keyword gets 1800 exact searches a month. I have not put adsense on the site yet.

I was never expecting a first page presence until a couple of months in to be honest.

My issue is......Why the hell are the other 29 copycat sites not even ranking? Some of them did show up on the second or third page briefly but then fell.....the google dance. I never did a thing different with any of the sites.

When I say the sites are similar, think along this line....bluedogcoats.com, reddogcoats.net, yellowdogcoats.com, orangedogcoats.org, purpledogcoats.com etc. etc.

Google....you make it damn tough to figure out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Note....none of the sites have backlinks.
#experimentmakes #google #ranking #sense
  • Profile picture of the author Ben Acharyaa
    Thats becoz google doesnt want to show same design, same content, same images in the first page for your keyword. google thought that these sites all look same so i'm going to show only the best site to my users.
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    • Profile picture of the author nik0
      Banned
      Originally Posted by Ben Acharyaa View Post

      Thats becoz google doesnt want to show same design, same content, same images in the first page for your keyword. google thought that these sites all look same so i'm going to show only the best site to my users.
      With same amount of images and content I assume that it's not duplicate content, but just the same amount/style.

      If what you say is true then people should never use any premium or free website theme as with 1000's of users using the same theme there will be tons of similarities.
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      • Profile picture of the author Ben Acharyaa
        Originally Posted by nik0 View Post

        With same amount of images and content I assume that it's not duplicate content, but just the same amount/style.

        If what you say is true then people should never use any premium or free website theme as with 1000's of users using the same theme there will be tons of similarities.
        i've had a similar case with one of my site where i made a design and before uploading it in its domain i uploaded in a domain that was already up and running to check a few things.

        for example i had registered demo.com for this specific website but before i uploaded the design in the domain i uploaded it in another of my domain like mysite.com/demo. after a week i uploaded the design to demo.com and started to optimize for it.

        what happened is demo.com was nowhere to be found but mysite.com/demo was ranking in the first page for some low competition keywords. i was like what!!!??? i dont even want to rank for that domain as its a completely different niche. later i used canonical tag to solve the problem. my guess is both these pages had identical content so google preffered mysite.com/demo over demo.com becoz it was indexed first. Ofcourse those were hosted in same hosting account!!


        EDIT: actually this happened when i had designed a site for a client and uploaded it in a subdomain to show him the design first.
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    • Profile picture of the author gbarrows31
      Originally Posted by Ben Acharyaa View Post

      Thats becoz google doesnt want to show same design, same content, same images in the first page for your keyword. google thought that these sites all look same so i'm going to show only the best. site to my users.
      This is also true if you host all the sites from the same hosting account.. believe it or not Google will consider all those sites on one server as duplicate you can even get de-indexed!
      If you only have 10 sites or so - just host them all on the same hosting. Unless they are each earning a significant amount, then you might want to consider diversifying. However, once you start getting 30, 40, or 50 sites - it might be time to start thinking about a second hosting account. The call is yours.
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  • Profile picture of the author nik0
    Banned
    As you say, identical content, but when just using the same design/theme but different worded content it should not result in these type of issue's. But well, with GOogle you never know lol.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ben Acharyaa
    Okay i completely misunderstood "Same amount of images and content" as "same images and content". yeah that would be a different case. however i think if 30 websites are hosted in a single account, with all the websites having same theme, same plugins, same header and same titles, it might look suspicious!! and yeah you're right, with google you never know!!
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    • Profile picture of the author Hansons
      Originally Posted by Ben Acharyaa View Post

      Okay i completely misunderstood "Same amount of images and content" as "same images and content". yeah that would be a different case. however i think if 30 websites are hosted in a single account, with all the websites having same theme, same plugins, same header and same titles, it might look suspicious!! and yeah you're right, with google you never know!!
      Google knows all these things..

      Your site must be hosted on same IP address.

      Your domain name is registered with the same name, address and email id.

      These are the thing that are giving signals to Google...
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      • Profile picture of the author Ben Acharyaa
        Originally Posted by Hansons View Post

        Google knows all these things..

        Your site must be hosted on same IP address.

        Your domain name is registered with the same name, address and email id.

        These are the thing that are giving signals to Google...
        Lol i know what information google keeps of mine. i knew what my problem was and i fixed it. and i'm guessing OP's problem must've been that all those 30 sites were hosted in a single IP. well thats my opinion. if there's anything else you want to add, i'd be glad to read.
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        • Profile picture of the author Thack
          Thanks for the comments.

          My sites are hosted on the same account, however it is a reseller account at hostgator. I am not using sub domains. All on different c panels and to my understanding the account has a few different ip's. I will do some pings and confirm later.

          Domains are registered under the same name.

          Content. I had professional content written for each site, The content is not the same, but uses the same flow. The headings are the same. The two images that were shared on each site, I changed the file title, and alt description for each site.

          I have 4 different servers/hosting accounts. I was trying the reseller account out to see if this would work however.

          I will get back with the ip results.
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  • Profile picture of the author Backlinko
    It's probably that the first page site is targeting a less competitive keyword.

    Even within the same niche there are certain long tails that are MUCH easier than others. That's my vote.
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  • Profile picture of the author sackboy127
    Probably less competition on that particular keyword, plus the usual capricious nature of big G are the main culprits here.
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  • Profile picture of the author ArielT
    I think is due having better sites to show (according to Google) so you should take a look to those

    I don't think Google is against people having many sites unless thinks there is something trying to game the system which doesn't seem the case or not obvious at least
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    • Profile picture of the author Thack
      I did a ping on the sites. Some sites hold the same ip, but for the most part the last couple of digits are different in the ip's. Any of the pros know if the last couple of digits of the ip being different is enough? I am figuring not now. I should have distributed them on my other servers. I was hoping the reseller hosting, different cpanel, different ip (slightly) would work.

      As for the less competition for the one keyword, that was my original thought, but this term gets 1800 exact match searches in the US, and has several sites targeting the key word. It is also a high cpc phrase.

      Thanks again for the input guys. I will keep monitoring and update if the other sites start to rank. Some of them do show up in the top 5 pages, then disappear.
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