Unfortunately, Google’s changes have been affecting legit blogs. One noteworthy example is Cult of Mac, a blog that aims to provide “timely news, insightful analysis, helpful how-tos and honest product reviews about Apple and Apple-related products.”

Cult of Mac has experienced the opposite of Google’s goal: their content has largely disappeared from Google’s SERPs, while content farms and spam-blogs scraping Cult of Mac posts have been pushed to the top.

A lot of our traffic came from Google, which is why the changes are so serious. I’m already seeing a big drop-off in traffic. Over the weekend and today, the traffic is half what it normally would be.

I’m pissed because we’ve worked our asses off over the last two years to make this a successful site. Cult of Mac is an independently owned small business. We’re a startup. We have a small but talented team, and I’m the only full timer. We’re busting our chops to produce high-quality, original content on a shoestring budget.

Indeed, Cult of Mac does break a lot of stories. Along with the Boy Genius Report, Mac Rumors and 9 to 5 Mac, they together are the source of the lion’s share of Apple-related reporting. It’s strange that Google’s algorithm would red-flag them as a content farm. Perhaps it is a result of “splogs” scraping their content; maybe a glitch in Google’s secret algorithm is causing one of the spam blogs to be marked as the original source for some reason or another?

What I want to know is what Google thinks about duplicate content cases such as Reference.com or the Associated Press.

Head over to Reference.com, the encyclopedia branch of the Ask.com network of reference sites. Enter a search term. Now go over to Wikipedia and enter the same search term. They’re the same! Reference.com is pulling Wikipedia articles onto their site and throwing in a few ads. (How are they doing this? Does Wikipedia have some sort of API?) What does Google think of this?

Or what about Associated Press articles? They’re syndicated by many newspapers, and appear on their websites. That means the same article on multiple sites, no?

Is Google demoting these pages in their results, or are they giving them a free pass? It’s hard to tell. Reference.com as a whole has a toolbar PageRank of 8, while their iPod article is listed as N/A (while the original Wikipedia article has a PageRank of 7). So that would lead us to believe that they’re being demoted. There’s not really any way to tell for sure though, is there?

It seems that the algorithm is working, and filtering out pages such as those, but I’d like to know what the search giant’s opinion is on such pages. Is duplicate content simply duplicate content?