We’re not talking laundry here. In fact, this is a very real and very serious matter for any web entrepreneur.
Before we continue, we want to emphasize that we don’t practice such techniques nor do we condone them. We simply want to bring this to the attention of the community. We certainly do NOT recommend the use of such techniques. While this situation rarely happens, it could happen to anyone so be prepared to handle it by having other traffic sources like indirect traffic through article submissions and pay-per-click programs.
Google Washing as it is named, is an unethical SEO practice where a site’s pages can be “washed out” of the search engine results pages by duplicate content. Google’s own Matt Cutt’s site was nowhere to be seen when content was duplicated from his blog in the beginning of October. The Google search engine duplicate filters are turned on high and no one is exempt — not even a Google employee. Google so far has had trouble differentiating the source of the content and it can, as the above example shows, happen to anyone.
There are two ways people can get ranked. Either push someone down or work to pull themselves up. This practice can be maliciously used by a competitor to remove a site from the rankings by applying the former, much easier method. This unethical practice is not unlike Google Bowling in its evil nature.
We’ll cover some other ways you can continue to optimize your site while gain the benefits of links and traffic at the same time in a later article.