Jessie, one of the benefits of a site like Cuttings.me is that it will eventually draw a lot of search engine traffic, which makes it more likely your work will be viewed by an editor. Most writers’ websites have little visibility in search engines.

Hi John – yes, they will be, at the moment. That said, it would be a very simple thing to stop if required. Google has been really good at picking up the structure of the site so far though (displaying clips under names hierarchically, etc) so I don’t see it as a tremendous problem. Anyone disagree?

Argh… properties of the algorithm: titles really matter, a lot.

By “professional SEO” I mean someone charging at $100/hr and delivering solid results for clients.

Dave, maybe penalty isn’t the right word… I don’t pretend to know what google does. What I can tell you is that duplicate content did prevent a listing for aboutfreelancewriting.com back in the beginning until I emailed an explanation… I’d moved content from what had been my writing site at about.com and about didn’t get it down very quickly even tho’ they said the would.

Once I wrote google, although they never responded, my new site started showing up. So I take the duplicate content thing seriously.

Gaaak. This thread won’t leave me alone…

Anne, that’s a stupendously relevant question, and in my opinion, the only people who can answer “correctly” are Google engineers and professional SEOs. Given the complexity of a ranking algorithm with thousands of signals (per Google’s documentation), the professional SEOs probably understand as well as the Google engineers. (Complexity induces emergent behavior.)

That said, from what I understand from reading Google, there is no “penalty” per se. It’s a matter of what Google decides is the most relevant result of similar results, and that’s what gets displayed.

You infer properties of the algorithm from this. For example, I once ranked for “practical wordpress tips,” having written 19 articles leading with that in the title. Never mind the tips were all different, Google only showed the most relevant, hiding all the rest under a “Show similar results” link.

But…

This works fine for me. I don’t see it as a penalty, I see as Google helping me out by delivering more results than asked for.

I could write more, but I have a lonely bird looking for an oven and flock of hungry birds winging down this evening.

Excellent, next week then.

Haha yes I got an alert on the error and saw what you were up to – I put it down to a healthy curiosity! Look forward to connecting with you soon – enjoy Thanksgiving!

Nicholas, I managed to get a server error which looks suspiciously like what Heroku serves up (which is very cool, btw). If you check your logs, you will see that I was requesting my profile link in xml format.

We’re about to kick off huge Thanksgiving weekend holiday here, so I’m out of commission from about now until Monday. Expect to hear from me next week!