One of things I wanted to follow up on my post about Google Knol SEO spam is in reference to Aaron Wall’s post about how he was testing Google’s lack of concern over copyright infringement:

One day after Knol publicly launched Wil Reynolds noticed that a Knol page was already ranking. Danny Sullivan did a further test showing that 33% of his test set of Knol pages were ranking in the first page of search results. Danny was also surprised that his Knol was ranking #28 after 1 day. After citing it on his blog now that Knol page ranks #1 in Google!

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Maybe we are being a bit biased and/or are rushing to judgement? Maybe a more scientific effort would compare how Knol content ranks to other content when it is essentially duplicate content? I did not want to mention that I was testing that when I created my SEO Basics Knol, but the content was essentially a duplicate of my Work.com Guide to Learning SEO (that was also syndicated to Business.com). Even Google shows this directly on the Knol page

Google Knows its Duplicate Content

Assuming for the moment that we are not rushing to judgment, this would suggest Google has a very high tolerance (94%!) for duplicate content. Since my blog is a lowly PR 3 at the time of this post (hopefully will go up in time), just about every time my post is sphunn on Sphinn, the Sphinn post replaces my original article in the SERPs.

Going back to Wall’s Knol page, it even got as high as position 2 for SEO Basics (now in position 11 at the time of this post), all for a duplicate content page, while the original page ranked highly for other keywords due to titling the articles differently.

What this means: Any grayhat SEOs could optimize an article many times over by publishing content everywhere on the web and rank for hundreds of keywords all by changing the headers. Got an article that talks about both Chinese dumplings and potstickers? Use the same article, but change up the keywords in the header so you can get both to rank for the different keywords.