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Why some websites rank higher even though they have thousands of spammy links (28:45)



Google can get things wrong, this happens. You can report such websites.



In general, if a website has spammy links doesn’t mean that Google won’t show it in search. Google tries to ignore spammy links (and doesn’t ‘give credit’ for them). Or it might lower such websites in the search results.

But these websites with spammy links might still have other good signals, so even with lowered rankings, they might be ranked fairly high. That’s why you can sometimes see your competitors rank high even though they have spammy links pointing to their websites.



Duplicate content across websites is not penalized but has negative consequences (35:38)



You won’t be penalized if you have duplicate content (e.g. articles) on different websites. But in this case, you’re competing with yourself. So it’s better to concentrate on one platform as much as possible.



How to make Google pick up your changes quickly (40:50)



From a crawling point of view, there are things you can do to make sure Google picks up your pages quickly.



Firstly, make sure you have hub pages which list recent pages. For example, on a news website, this can be the homepage and categories with recent stories.



Secondly, use <lastmod> for your pages in your xml sitemap file. So that when a new page appears and Google sees that it has recently been modified (in this place – created), it tries to index it as quickly as possible.



Last but not least, make sure that your server and website in general are quick. This is critical for Google when it comes to crawling and indexing resources.

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