Does track-backing usually ruin other people’s Google rankings?
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I have a Socionics focused blog for which I’ve spent weeks building up and slowly improving my google ranking for keyword “socionics”.
I used Tag Surfer to find a related post and invited an author to comment on my post. He quoted the whole article and left a track-back on my original post.
My google ranking for keyword “socionics” at position 10-12 has now been “hijacked” by someone who track-backed an article I posted. His track-backed post has now taken over where my site was comfortably listed and my site has been pushed back to 30th position!
WTF!?
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A trackback is very useful because it let’s you know when someone else has linked to your original article. As for this party who “scraped” your entire post all I can suggest is that you contact that person. The protocol is to only quote a portion of the original post and to provide a link back to the original so readers click through to it. Here’s the link to Lorelle’s post on what to do if you do discover someone has been stealing your blog content http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/what-do-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/
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Its not so much a case of “stealing” content because I have allowed my article to be excerpted with a link back to me.
The original question thus stands… why did a ping/track- back cause me to go from 12 to 30 in google’s ranks whilst the blog that used my content that has NOTHING to do with my subject matter (i.e. “socionics”) has now taken my original google search position.
Its like a weird bug/side-effect or something of someone who used my content (legally) and buggered up my google ranking as a result.
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This is a very interesting question by the poster. Not that I can shed any light – but it is very curious.
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It’s quite possible that the switchup is legitimate. Check Technorati and you’ll probably find that you’ve got X number of links to that post from blogs that are Y important…this is what Google uses to figure out where to put you. If he’s got more links to his post which excerpts you (or they are from more authoritative pages), he will outrank you. I often outrank the pages I link to.
So it’s not that you’ve been downgraded in absolute terms, it’s more that bigfoots have moved into the field, and your former position is lower relative to them.
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I can only surmise that it is actually a “good” thing that my google ranking has worsened. My daily hits hasn’t really been affected. In fact it might be a good idea to stir up debate for the original post by doing my own response and track-backing that.
I just find it extremely weird though that a person who’s overall site has nothing to do with my subject matter has hijacked my previous google ranking.
I have checked Technorati and his blog has a very high Authority ranking compared to mine so that probably explains the switch in google rankings.
Ok then, how do you think that would affect my traffic?
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If your daily hits haven’t been affected, there’s your answer. And Google pagerank and your place in the listings are different things. Your pagerank has, if anything, probably gone up. You can’t prevent important, popular websites from posting about things and bigfooting you, but you got credit from them, so that’s something good. It boosted you in Technorati rankings.
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I wouldn’t think that Google considers Technorati’s authorities as part of its algorithm. Its own PR yes.
But it certainly does not follow necessarily that two blogs with content which is similar are going to be ranked according to the volume of that content. My 200 word article on the Zulu Wars might outrank someone else who has five articles on the same subject. But it might not. Gotta love Google. -
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