How do image search engines work?

Will search engines still work well with my Web site?

• A Web site (mentalhelp.net) has published my book, Psychological Self-Help (/psyhelp/), for six years. Now, an over-arching Web site (CenterSite.com) wants to establish many (50-100) Web sites having their own domain names to serve local mental health centers and EAPs. Each of these Web sites would, as planned, be able to link to my book using just their domain name and /psyhelp/, for example: http://www.youthandfamilies.org/psyhelp/ I have no objection to these 50-100 Web sites linking to my book. My question is: Will this situation of 50-100 future URLs with different domain names all linking to my content cause any search engine problems? My book is free; thus, there is little money for advertising. Therefore, many of my readers get to my book via search engines. I can't afford to mess up with the search engines. Clay

• Answer:

  Hello Clay ~ I can certainly understand your concern about the consequences of 50-100 sites with identical content incorporating your book as if it were a part of the site. A valid question is whether or not, or at what point, might those sites be considered the equivalent of search engine spam - and to whose detriment? ========================= What Google Says ========================= Google offers a spam reporting tool on its "More Google: Search Quality and Your Feedback", emphasizing that "Google strives to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage website managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by both users and search engines alike. Unfortunately, not all websites have our users' best interests at heart." - ://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html Google uses those reports to either improve the quality of its site search returns, or in particularly egregious cases of deception, will remove those pages from the index entirely. What is interesting to note is there is a check box for "Duplicate site or pages". A natural question should be how those pages CenterSite is proposing will effect your own pages on mentalhelp.net. Additionally, Google's Webmaster Guidelines specifically state, "... we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites." - ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html Under the mentioned "Quality Guidelines - Specific Recommendations", there is a specific mention of multiple domains with the same content: "Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations: * Avoid hidden text or hidden links. * Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects. * Don't send automated queries to Google. * Don't load pages with irrelevant words. * Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. * Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content." - ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html Obviously, there is reason for concern with regard to your own site if every one of those domains is going to contain the same content. Let's take a look at how your site looks to Google currently. ========================= Your Site's PageRank and Links to Your Site ========================= Using the Google Toolbar, your site currently has a PageRank of 6/10 - which is a respectable PageRank. [Note: The Google Toolbar can be downloaded at http://toolbar.google.com and installed on a Windows-based computer if you use Internet Explorer as your browser] Since Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including its PageRank algorithm, a higher PageRank such as 6/10 is to your advantage in being found under the terms you want searchers to find you. Google's Page Rank technology is explained on "Our Search: Google Technology", here: - ://www.google.com/technology/index.html And the importance of links TO your site is discussed on Google's site in "Submitting Your Site", stating, "The best way to ensure Google finds your site is for your page to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we'll find you quickly." - ://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html#A2 There are other resources as well, which contain reliable information about the relevant links to your site - as opposed to the multiple pages containing the same content and/or cookie cutter sites. Some of those sources are Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch - http://www.searchenginewatch.com and the discussions, particularly Google News, on Webmaster World - http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/ Please remember, though, that only Google knows the very specific information about their algorithms, and they're not going to reveal much about them, except to the extent listed on their Technology Page. - ://www.google.com/technology/index.html Even we Google Answers Researchers are not privy to the inner workings of Google, and we do not have any insider information with regard to Google's search engine results. The closest you may come to an "official" stance from Google are those comments supplied by GoogleGuy (a Google employee) who does comment in some threads in Webmaster World (link above). What I find interesting about your own page is that if we perform a search for your specific section of mentalhelp.net, that is, for "www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/" (without the quotation marks), we get the following results: "Psychological Self-Help - Table of Contents §. Search Psych Self Help. §. ... Description: A free, online self-help book on depression, anxiety, relationships, sex, and well-being. Category: Shopping > Publications > ... > Self Help > Specific Titles Google can show you the following information for this URL: * Show Google's cache of www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/ * Find web pages that are similar to www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/ * Find web pages that link to www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/ * Find web pages that contain the term "www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/" (From Google Search Results) ://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=www.mentalhelp.net%2Fpsyhelp%2F&btnG=Google+Search The first line above is the table of contents to your actual website. The "Category: Shopping > ..." is the listing in Google's Directory, which is fed by the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org). Clicking on the link from "Find web pages that link to ...", though, produces 420 links: ://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=link:dRCzedPVlPQJ:mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/ Those links include internal links on the mentalhelp.net site which refer to your book as well as individual chapters and pages within your book. On the other hand, using Google's link:tool - that is, putting "link: www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/" in the Google search box - produces only 28 results, and only *ONE* of those are from either mentalhelp.net or CenterSite - the Chapter 10 download ... and that was on the last page. You mentioned youthandfamilies.org/psyhelp/; and CenterSite mentions another organization, Bridgeway Center (www.bridgewaycenter.org) who also has a /psyhelp/ section identical to yours. I found the Bridgeway Center on the CenterSite information page here: - www.bridgewaycenter.org/psyhelp/ Both of those sites have a PageRank of 0. And they do not 'appear' to actually link to your book on the mentalhelp.net. I tried searching for other organizations similar to youthandfamilies.org/psyhelp, using the following search terms from your book: * WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGICAL SELF-HELP? * ISBN 1-890873-00-4 * forces and laws of nature that support life and evolution (from the acknowledgements) and even * /psyhelp/chap11/ There are lots of links to those pages, either from sites referring to your book or from the mentalhelp.net sites. None that I could find from either the Youth and Families or Bridgeway Center domains. And remembering that there are a lot of affiliate sites out there that are cookie cutter / identical sites to their affiliate association, I searched every place I could to find a definitive answer to your question. On Google's search, I tried * Google + affiliate sites * Google + spam * search engines PLUS affiliate sites * search engines PLUS spam * search engine spam I searched for similar terms on * Webmaster World - http://www.webmasterworld.com * Search Engine Watch - http://searchenginewatch.com * SEO Chat - http://www.seochat.com/ * Search Engine Secrets - http://www.search-engine-secrets.net * Search Engine Guide - http://www.searchengineguide.com After looking through their sites and the search engine results on "search engine spam", there are a lot of obvious 'spamming' behavior, such as stuffing metatags, tricks with hidden text and doorway pages, that have been penalized by search engines. When we get to sites with identical content, it gets a bit harder to definitively state sites are penalized for that. It has been noted that a lot of Affiliate sites are not listed in the search engines. Whether this is due to the fact they're just a cookie cutter site or that there are no links TO those sites is hard to determine. The only real mention I have seen of the type of sites you are asking about are references to the fact that Google says "don't do it". In your own case, we can see that it hasn't hurt your situation - at least not yet. You have both a respectable PageRank and important links from relevant sites to your own. Of course, it's very hard to find the other two sites, Youth and Families and Bridgeway Center, in the search engines, and they certainly come nowhere near the popularity your own site enjoys. ========================= Summary ========================= Google says don't do it. I think it is safe to assume that if Google specifically mentions and recommends against it, there is a reason for doing so. Even if they may not be penalizing the practice now, there is no guarantee they won't do so in the future. Why take the chance? The practice does not seem to have helped either of the two sites which I could find that used that method - I could find neither of them in search engine results, and their PageRank is 0/10. There are more acceptable ways to link to your book from any of the sites CenterSite may create, just by creating a hyperlink, instead of having the book appear as a part of those sites. Such a hyperlink is better than trying to include it on a cookie cutter site, which may ultimately be more harmful than helpful. Current hyperlinks from sites to your book hasn't hurt those who link in that manner, and it can only be more beneficial to you AND to mentalhelp.net on whose site your book currently resides. Thank you, Clay, for the opportunity to tackle this challenging question. I would have liked to deliver a definitive answer that clearly said, one way or the other, whether this is a good idea. Perhaps the lack of evidence speaks more than we realize. Best regards, Serenata