Clipmarks is a wonderful web clipping tool that lets you quickly save specific pieces of any web page online. Your clips are also indexed by Google and other search engines.
When people share content from your website onto Clipmarks, you get some extra visitors but that could also hurt the rankings of your website or blog in Google.
That’s because Clipmarks doesn’t link to the original story and Google can assume that Clipmarks is the original owner of the content that is actually written by you.
What you see on the Clipmarks website is actually different from content that is presented to Googlebot. Here’s an example – someone clipped a my article on Gmail Addresses and saved it to Clipmarks here.
Looking at this clip, one may think that Google will have no trouble recognizing the original source since the Clipmarks clip clearly attributes the source and links to the actual story.
Well, that’s not true because Clipmarks is displaying the story inside an IFRAME that are not indexed by Google spiders.
And if you are left wondering how Clipmarks still manages to rank in Google when they put everything in an IFRAME, look at the embed box that’s on every Clipmarks page.
This area has the full HTML of your content – Google bots can very easily read this text but there are no live links so you don’t get any juice.
Open the same clip in Google Cache and you’ll immediately know the difference. Only the internal links are live, rest everything is in plain text. Clipmarks can therefore be a source of worry especially for blogs that are relatively new and still experiencing the Google Sandbox effect.
If you find your content copied verbatim on Clipmarks, I recommend asking them to take down the clip because this could hurt the rankings of your own page in search engines (read: Duplicate Content).
To get a clip removed, you will need to send a formal DMCA request addressed to copyright@clipmarks.com (Eric Goldstein) – they’ll make the clip private so it remains invisible to search engines and can only be viewed by the person who originally clipped it.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/search/clipmarks-hurt-google-rankings-website/2764/
Tags: clipmarks, feature, google, seo, web clipping, Internet, Search
Reader Comments
Again a very useful tip !!
I am very thankful to you for constant flow of good and useful posts !!!!!!!!!!!
Written by ArpitNext on 03.31.08
This is more a fraud by clipmark…why do they want to design their website this way? Google should penalize clipmark and not rank the clips there…
Written by Techblissonline.com on 03.31.08
Although I have been using “clipmarks” for a long long time but I didn’t know about the “website ranking”. Thanks for this information.
Besides the link created by clipmark, I also create another link to original article.Can this avoid any “hurt to website ranking” of original author or not?
Written by dockanth on 03.31.08
This means I should keep an eye on clipmark, just in case some of my posts land on it. Already some of my posts have ended up on some sites (from rss feeds I was told)…
Written by pcsourcepoint on 03.31.08
Very informative. Btw, we can’t really detect all those contents clipped by others, and this is troublesome. What about asking Clipmark to modify their iFrame?
Thx
Written by gofree on 04.01.08
WoW, that’s a quite serious stuff! A real eye opener. What is the Google reaction about the ClipMarks? Why they don’t ignore them?
Could you ask them, because you have much better contacts, there? (your value in ‘Google eyes’)
Thanks!
Written by curt s. on 04.02.08
I would think the search engines would be able to read the cite=”www….” references which I see in the body.
Written by Anne H on 04.02.08
Agreed, Clipmarks does clearly use the site and blockquote tags which should circumvent the issue. I agree that it need monitoring nonetheless, because Google indexes Clipmarks very quickly indeed. On a website a day old, I’ve got clipmarks ranking some of my search terms for me in under 40 mins. Not highly competitive ones, but ones competing against .ac.uks and Google Books.
Written by Chris on 07.09.08