Hot Summer and Duplicate Content

Temperatures are high today  32 degrees Celcius around lunch time, with a humidex of 40 - which means it felt like 40 degrees. Sure did.


I had planned out today like clockwork, but from the time I opened my email this morning, NOTHING has gone right.

My son had complained yesterday of red & pink and swollen and itchy eyes. My first thought was pinkeye which is contagious. He still had symptoms when he woke up this morning. I had an appointment I had to attend and my son was supposed to be going to camp. Now I would have to cancel my appointment and take my son to the doctor.

When I opened my email - I found an email from Squidoo accusing me of writing  Duplicate content on a lens I had made yesterday. I spent hours yesterday writing all the content for that lens myself. This was done  for a challenge and now the lens is under threat and may be deleted due to duplicate content.

When I checked the lens myself, it turns out that every line I wrote was duplicated elsewhere - but each line was duplicated on a different  webpage - as if Squidoo now says that I spent hours surfing the net looking for common phrases to copy. Why would I do that?

 It's not my fault that my style of writing is similar to other people's. And when filters are set to just 5 words - yes FIVE WORDS - that is not even a full phrase, let alone a complete sentence!!!

This is the second lens that I have been warned for Duplicate content. The first one was locked and eventually deleted because NOONE at Squidoo would tell me exactly what the problem was. These filters  are automatic (computer algorithms), not done manually.

It all has to do with Google. If Google sees duplicate content then Google punishes the copies and indexes only the original. At least that is what is supposed to happen.

And if the filters claim that 5 words in a row means you copied someone else, well then, every single english language page on the web must have duplicate content at some point, because there are only so many words in the english language and only so many ways to put them together. There is BOUND to be some repetition

If more than one person happens to use the same exact common English phrase, then only the first usage gets indexed on Google, everyone else gets slapped with Duplicate Content.

If this is what happened on the first lens that was deleted because I used common english phrases that were seen elsewhere, then Squidoo is going way overboard in its filtering - and NOT responding either is very UNPROFESSIONAL.

If this new lens gets locked and deleted because NOONE responds to my emails, then I will be closing my account with Squidoo. It's been fun, but this duplicate content nonsense is just going too far.


I wont bother to move my content to anywhere else either - apparently this same duplicate content nonsense is happening all over the web. So I will just stop writing online. There's no point any more.

Google has taken all the fun out of writing.