Duplicate Content Experiment
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.