There are many reasons why a page ranks well….good optimization, good content, and links.
But all 3 need to work together especially when trying to rank for a competive term like “ukraine cruises” on the Value Cruises website.
For some reason the main pages on Value Cruises have not been ranking. They have good page rank and are somewhat optimized. This quick little trick exposed why!
1) I simply took a chunk of text from the Value Cruises Ukraine Waterways Highlights page.
http://www.valuecruises.net/specific_prg_intro.aspx?prgid=299
2) I plugged that content into Google (in parenthaseis)
3) River.affordabletours.com ranks first
this means that Google first indexed their content. thus yours is considered duplicate content and has no value (to the search engines)
I realize they are a reseller but Value Cruises will not be able to rank as long as there is duplicate content present. This is why all new fresh content is important and its equally important that it gets seen before someone else publishes it.
Here is a quote from the Google Webmaster Support Forum
Make different content on both sites – or it will be duplicate content – period.
The concept of Google is to literally have ONE site that ranks BEST out of all content… and to remove the duplication from the web…
It’s not about the web sites any more – but more for the searchers…
So if you have duplicate content – you’ve got a penalty going to hit you once it is noted.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=1d51c812fe0dab3b&hl=en
So at some point any content on the site that is duplicate to other sites will have to be rewritten.
