Note: Eventually I do cover 4 steps to take when your content is the victim of an over-eager algorithm. But it's towards the end;-)

SEO mastermind Graywolf took a look at my post on the negative consequences of a front page Digg. He concluded that my original source article is getting hit by a duplicate content penalty. His inference is based on this search:

"This question got serious consideration for the top spot"

What this search shows is that Google drops the original source of this quote all the way to the very, very bottom of the search results. When an exact-match search of a unique phrase see your content drop to the very bottom of the search results, you can be fairly sure that your content been penalized by an algorithm... and in this case a stupid algorithm.

While Graywolf is probably right, it's very hard for me to think that something else isn't going on. After all, a billion dollar company should be able to see obvious clues like "100s of backlinks" and properly identify the source as the one article that all those scrapers and editorial references link back to. It seems other-worldly that Google, the billion dollar beast, would fail in such an obvious case, to identify the original source of the content.

Which leads me to this conclusion: Google is trying to crack down on "scramble scrapers" - scrapers who take content from lots of different sources and piece it together. Why do I think this? Because the original source of content, referenced above, received a steady stream of comments that probably looked to Google like a scraper piecing together more and more content from different sources.

I'm not 100% sure about this. But I really can't think of any other good explanation.

But that's not the point of this article!!!

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