Ken Wong writes - "I'm in China and can't access blogspot.com directly, so i use pkblogs.com to read your blog. Today the pkblogs or inblogs.net link says that DI is a banned blog. What happened ?"Like Ken, a lot of our readers based in countries like China, Pakistan, etc (where blogspot.com is blocked by government) use the excellent pkblogs.com service to read this blog. The service has also been a big help during the blogspot ban in India last July.
But as some of you would have guessed, we recently requested the pkblogs.com developers to remove our blog from their system and they immediately acted.
Now if you are left wondering why we raised such a request when the service was actually helping people read this blog, here are the two main reasons:
Reason 1 - Search Engines Penalize Duplicate Content: For every article posted on Digital Inspiration, there were two mirror webpages created immediately - one on the pkblogs.com domain and the other on inblogs.net - both these duplicate pages were indexed by the search engines in the same way as our main webpage.
There was a risk involved since search engines generally penalize websites with duplicate content. Plus it was creating clutter on the web.
Reason 2 - Adsense Earnings Could be Affected: Since we monetize this blog via Adsense, Google Ads were shown to users even if the webpages were opened indirectly via the inblogs or pkblogs' hyperlink.
Now Google has this smart pricing algorithm meaning if you are displaying Google Ads on a number of websites, even one low-performing website can cause Google to lower the ad prices (CPM) of all sites in your account.
This was again a big risk to our revenue stream since pkblogs.com/labnol or inblogs.net/labnol were showing Google ads with our Publisher ID.
So what's the alternative for users in China or Pakistan ? We have now switched to full feeds meaning you can read the entire blog post in any of your RSS readers.
And if RSS is greek to you, just type this URL in the browser to read the blog. You will however miss the visitor comments.
Related: How to Access Blocked Webpages in School or At Work ?
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/11/for-di-readers-in-china-iran-pakistan.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
That really is a bold step Amit. But now that you have full post in RSS won't you lose traffic because people like me won't even come to the blog. I visited your blog only to read the complete article and also feeds take a lot of time to update. I am not sure but sometimes feedburner takes about a day to update the feed (i say this on my personal experience)
Written by
Sharique on 19/11/06 12:00 AM
How did you Contact PKblogs to ask them to remove your blog?
Written by
Linu on 19/11/06 11:22 PM
Why don't you suggest readers to use proxies like kproxy.com or browseatwork.com?
I don't think they are banned as well..
Written by
Anand on 21/11/06 1:37 AM
can i know how we consider the post is duplicate content?
if i write something and i do "quote" some part of the content from other website. is that duplicate? duplicate some part only?
if i writ them in my own words or change the content.. add some words. are those also called duplicate content?
Written by
Jack on 22/11/06 1:27 PM
I haven't found it to be true that Google penalises duplicate content. In fact, all I've seen to be true is that Google indexes everything and just lets the page with the highest Pagerank get the traffic for any duplicate content.
Are you simply concerned about your content being duplicated, or can you show that there's a real chance of getting penalised for it?
At my blog I link to a 13-minute movie I made debunking the Duplicate Content Penalty Myth.
Neil Shearing.
Written by
Neil Shearing on 12/10/07 4:05 PM