Saturday, April 23, 2016

Warning to Blogger Users, the New "Featured Post Widget" Causes a Google Duplicate Content Penalty. Do Not Use a Text Snippet in "Featured Post"





























Update 4-20-16
Great news, after I removed the text snippet from the "Featured Post" to the right of this webpage Google has now indexed this webpage and it is fine now.
Thank you Google.


4-14-16
I think Blogger has accidentally caused a problem with the Google search engine algorithms.
Or it is a mistake by the Google Spam Police (which I doubt).

The Googler that wrote the following support page did a outstanding job of explaining when you should use a nofollow tag support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
Those are the only two possible SEO reasons. So this problem is 100% Google's fault. Since Google has done unfair and bad things to me in the past, I am very sensitive to my webpages being unfairly penalized. 
Now I noticed since I added the "Featured Post" many of my webpages that were previously in Google have been taken out. So I feel 90% certain the new Blogger widget for "Featured Post" caused this bad problem.

I created this article and it was in the Google search engine (indexed) until I made it a "Featured Post".
Now it is not in the Google cache and I think it may be a duplicate content penalty from the Google search engine software.

So if you are a Blogger user and decide to create a "Featured Post", it may cause your webpage to be removed from the Google search engine.

On 4-14-16 I turned off the text from the penalized page that shows up in the "Featured Post" (see to the right of this webpage).
Hopefully if I tell Blogger not to show that text, then the page will be put back into the Google search engine. I will follow up in a week and see what happens.

I own FlowerDeliveryUSA.us, so I should not be penalized for an outbound link to my own website. Plus I am using the domain name as the anchor text and not using any keywords in my link text (anchor text).
Next I will discuss this even further and explain what I know about Google duplicate content penalties. Like many of the Google software filters, they are better at penalizing than checking if a penalty should be taken off. Meaning if I removed my unfairly penalized article from being a "Featured Post", Google may still never remove the "duplicate content penalty", which my webpage should have never received in the first place.
Also Google seems to run their duplicate content checker randomly, and that is why some duplicate content is caught by Google and some is not.
There are several other SEO factors involved with duplicate content penalties. When Google does run their duplicate content checker, a major attribute that the Google algorithms consider is what percentage of duplicate content triggers a penalty. E.g. 30%, 50% or 75%. So if you think about this the less content on a page means it is easier to receive a duplicate content penalty.

Why?
Because if there is less content on a webpage then copying part of it to use on a different webpage, you are therefore at a higher percentage of duplicate content because the page you are copying from has a small of amount of content to start with. If you combine this concept with the fact that some of my webpages are only videos, and Google cannot understand the content on a video yet.
So if you copy a snippet of text from a page with a low amount of text, to a new webpage that only has a video on it. Your percentage of duplicate content is in the range of 60%-99%.
Guess what you will trigger a Google duplicate content penalty. This is not a manual penalty.