Who's duplicating who according to Google?

[OnTilt]

Good evening,

We're two newbies in the affiliate world while having ~15 years combined in the gaming industry. We're building a quality website with two different subdomains where one is for free sports betting tips and the other is for quality content articles explaining every single aspect of how a bookmaker work and how you become a winner online.

We launched January 18th and are starting to rank good already on some search terms leading to the quality article part of the website. We've gone from >8,000,000 on Alexa to about 1,000,000 and ranking much better there than many of our competitors. We have a ~180 webpage site so far and apparently we're doing something right since we've gotten some depositing customers as well - and some followers on Twitter.

Our betting tips so far has been delivering with really good results and our writeups for each tips is quality with ~400 words. This has led to two of the biggest ranking websites in my country for the term "betting tips" contacting us. The biggest one has a section on the main page where it puts up like a 10 word excerpt with a "Read more"-link and logo directly to other websites betting tips. For this he wants a text link on one of our betting tips each day. I can't see how this can hurt us.

The other one wants a link from logo and text in our sidebar to its website. For this he instantly copies our betting tips content when we post it and put it on his website. It says in the list that the tips are from other websites so we get "our name" out there. There's no link to us but at the end of the betting tips there's a "Follow us on Twitter"-link and also it says "Source: OurDomainName.se" in text.

Could this hurt us? I'm assuming Google is indexing their website much more often than ours and if they get the content up minutes after us on their website, could Google possibly think that we're copying their content? Is their some kind of server time stamp so Google knows which content comes first?

Many thanks for your thoughts and suggestions.

Kind regards,
Stefan

[wonderpunter]

Well the second guy is using your content and not giving anything back "Juice" there should always be a link to your site.. if not this second website wants your content as his own with no benefit to yourself.. If he is too lazy to write his own content at least pass the juice from the work you have produced..

[universal4]

You may get a number of different opinions on this, but it seems that they did the write-up on you based upon your growth and the increase in rankings, that THEY recognized during search engine research.

While a mention and link back from what you consider to be authority sites in your country does sound great, to be forced to give back a link every single day from every single tip you publish seems out of line and a request that will surely benefit them more than you.

The second request for a sidebar link seems a little out of line especially since they want to then COPY every tip you publish. Like I said you may get a number of opinions, but I would decline BOTH offers. In fact I would certainly watch the second site closely and make sure they were NOT copying your content.

The site wanting to copy your content is not even following or using standard fair use rules and ants to use your content without providing a link and want to copy the content in it's entirety. If you decide to let them have any of it, I would recommend only a small portion (an excerpt of it) and REQUIRE a link back to the page where the visitor can read the entire tip.

This could well be an interesting discussion as I would really like to hear the other side of the story and why either of my reasons for decline are disagreed with.

Rick
Universal4

[wonderpunter]

The way I see it.. Not only do these sites use your content,. but they want you to back link to them for the privilege of them using your content due to their ranking status.. its a no win deal.. yes they may have good rankings giving bad deals to other sites scooping up their hard work, I Also run something similar.. And on game day for my articles I can out rank billion dollar sites.. DO NOT sell yourself out for some site that has authority.. have patience and the traffic and rewards will come, Create your own brand your own go to place.. you will achieve much better back links naturally anyhow

[OnTilt]

Many thanks for your input.

No experts on SEO as you probably understand but why is the first deal a bad one? The website aims to be "the only place you need to visit" and besides from writing 2-4 betting tips themselves each day they also link to other websites tips. We have to provide our graphics before this deal is actually started but as I see it we need to link to this authority once every day. The more betting tips we write each day the less exposure they will get, while we get a link in from each tips as far as I've understood it. Seeing how it operates today at least it seems like we would get about the same number of links back as they get. He will get them from a unique url ourdomain.se/post-name-for-that-day/ while we will get ours from competitor.se and competitor.se/page/1 and so on when new tips are being added. This competitor seems to be the one that uses keyword planning the wisest and ranks the best on many main keywords - but maybe they gain something from the above which I don't understand?

On the second deal I get it now and that's also why asked for help. This second website has another section where there's a short excerpt and direct link to some authority websites. This is were we want to be if anywhere and he said that we could end up there "if everything goes well". But in the statistics it doesn't look like we're gaining much traffic so far (direct) thanks to these copied tips.

In theory, let's say we get a link for each tips they copy. Could google misinterpret and penalize us because they Think we're copying content from this authority website? Our competitor strips any links and got the content up within minutes after we post.

//Stefan

[wonderpunter]

No, I have many sites that link to my articles daily with higher authority... but they link to me which is how google sees it.. The 1st site is fine doing what they do.. 2nd site are taking advantage,. a backlink is not worth someone using your full article as their own, You are still new but with time you will see the rewards.. and 2ns site already knows this hence the lack of linking back to you and asking you to link to them

[sweetbet]

The first linking offer would sound ok to me if you were asked for ONE backlink only. Giving their site multiple links for in exchange for one lowly link doesn't sound like a good deal. The second link offer does not appeal to me in the least. Firstly, he's copying your content, so there is a duplicate content issue. Secondly, his site is probably being crawled more often than yours, which means that google might treat your site as copying his content. Thirdly, you're not getting the benefit of a link back to your site.

[OnTilt]

Exactly Sweetbet. That was our concern to start with. Does Google know that our content is uploaded 5 minutes earlier or is when the crawling is done the most important thing.

Anyway. We've sent the logos to the owner of website number 1 now and will soon get visitors from him.

We've also contacted the owner of website number 2 and explaining our concerns about this hurting us in the long run and that we'd like to cancel the deal. He understood but asked if we'd like to get our posts under "Betting tips from other websites" instead, with the same deal. As he stated: "this is through RSS and can't hurt you". As mentioned before the deal is logo+text pretty far down in main sidebar. In this section "betting tips from other websites" I see that 3-4 other authority websites get their tips listed, including website number 1. I said that we hadn't considered that because of our size and that we're new, but I would check with my collegue and get back to him.

I'm assuming that website number 1 automatically gets our posts via RSS as well and therefore I think website number 2 is giving us the sweetest deal now. He wants a link to his website in our main sidebar while website number 1 asks for 1 daily text link in our posts. Website number 1 is, I believe, a greater authority site.

So, this brings us some more questions that we appreciate your thoughts on.

Your thoughts and accept or decline new offer from website number 2?
Listing via RSS feed with link is worth just as much as a written text link, isn't it?

EDIIT: FYI - Website number 1 lists like an excerpt of 10 words and website number lists it with ~30 words.

Many thanks.

[OnTilt]

In the end, as we see organic visitors grow and noticed that Google ranked us on page 3 for our main keyword today, we decided to say no thanks to both of these authority sites and continue what we're doing. It seems to be working and we think it might be the wisest choice in the long run. Thanks for your input!

[universal4]

I honestly think that is the wisest choice, and I would recommend you consider keeping an eye on the sites that contacted you and not allow them to copy any of your posts or articles completely, and if they want to reference any of your material they should provide a valid link.

Rick
Universal4

[Rostick]

What you give back is your business and from what I can see this is not what you asked.

IF they give you link back, it should not be anything wrong with Google. They probably import your content via feed, so google will recognize that the original is on your website and you get the link back to confirm it.

If your website is successful your feed will be copied by other sites anyway and you might not even know it (that`s how it`s like with betting tips). Google is pretty smart in this regard, but you MUST have link-back to you to be on the safe side.

UPDATE: read the whole discussion, I think my answer is still valid, so I won`t delete it.