About 5 weeks ago I submitted an article to another site (the name of which is purposefully not written) on SEO strategy. I've now posted that same article on this site to see if I can rank better than the other site.
The difference between the two sites is enormous. While SearchGrit is relatively new, the other site has been around for a long time. This site has articles numbering in the hundreds, while the other site has articles numbering in the thousands. And finally, the articles has been live on the other site for many weeks prior to it being posted here.
The only clue to Google that the article was written by me is that my name is on it. There are also some links after the article back to my site, but they all include the nofollow attribute. Are these clues enough for Google to determine that I'm the original author? I don't know, but I hope to find out with this little test.
The second part of this SEO experiment will be to ask the other site to post a link back to my site without a nofollow. Presumably a clean link from the article to me would reflect an acknowledgment by the original poster that the article came from me. I'm not sure that things actually work that way though.
Results
Update: July 8, 2007
The "other" site's ranking has dropped and is now in position 15 in Google. And unexpectedly, my copy of the SEO strategy article is in position 16. Interesting given both pages contain the same content.
Update: August 11, 2007
A check of the Google rankings shows that my article on SEO strategy now occupies slot 13 whereas the other copy has dropped down to position 18. Despite the other site being older, bigger, and more popular, I seem to have "claimed" the article as mine. And interestingly enough, both copies appear in the results despite being duplicates.
Update: January 19, 2008
Sadly I have to declare this experiment invalid. Between the time of publishing the duplicate article and now, I've changed the domain of this site from SearchGrit.com to AllThingsSEM.com. The change was unavoidable and has introduced far too many additional variables to be able to conclude anything.
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Entries (RSS)
I found this information and SEO experiment and very interested topic and information. Though, I was wondering what did you see or what were the results? Very interested to learn this information.
Thanks for your time,
Eric
http://ambatchmasterpublished.blogspot.com
http://www.squidoo.com/ambatchmasterpublisher/
I'm loving the experiments man. Keep it up! No email subscription offered to your feed? Bummer.
E-mail subscriptions added. It would seem I missed enabling that feature when I first set things up.
My thoughts on this is that there are many other variables between the 2 different sites you may have to investigate. Let's take the navigation as an example. As both sites add new content navigation may change and that also affect page ranking (aside of the overall domain ranking). So if the other site had to expose irrelevant links for navigation due to the fact they show thousands not hundreds of articles it may impact their pages.
I haven't run a specific experiment on this, but something else happened that is related and it's natural. Ok so I am the author of a script which I first published it on an open source forum and then updated the code, posted comments there etc. Approximately 1 year later, I started posting on my site about the same script, creating several pages with updates, code internals, general descriptions and the like none of which was posted on the old site. My pages also included parts of the old content.
You would expect google will follow up on it, index it and outrank the old site where I used to post. Well hasn't happened. I keep investigating the reasons, obviously mistakes like bloating irrelevant links around these pages on the new site, which may impact SEO, and I tried to tune these pages as much as I could. However I think external back links from feeds or otherwise, play a role. The other site is way too popular, with affiliates linking from all over the place. This structure (links posted externally) and the way the SEs perceive it, is something to consider.
Mario, if you could setup the date to show with each of your blog entries it will be great. It's a bit confusing to follow the time-line of events (the updates do have dates on which is good).