Fri 20 Mar 2009
Google Impervious To Duplicate Content Penalties or Filters?
Blurb by Shaun Anderson (Hobo)Duplicate content can be a nightmare for some websites. Sometimes it can harm rankings and conversions. While Google is pretty good at determining dupe content and serving up the correct page on a well put together site, even today many see duplicate content filters as actual penalties.
Actually, I’ve always considered duplicate content on one site that’s on another is an automatic penalty for one of the domains – the less authorative domain usually.
Maybe if you have mega domain authority, or a lot of organic links to both pages, duplicate content factors might be a non-issue or is that just if you are Google?.
They are very useful and free UK and US based keyword tools, it might be a bit cheeky to complain. But I wonder if they would have those listings if they weren’t Google and how much traffic damage is that second listing doing for the 3rd in the race?
While not 100% duplicate content, the pages are remarkably similar.
What you think? Impervious or Insideous lol?
Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)
I think its a little of both honestly, but I really like how you called out google with a screenshot. I guess when you are the googe you don’t have to follow your own rules!!
Google adwords tool
- I have just checked, and found the same page exists for google.co.nz, google.com.au etc. So Google is filtering out many of the different instances of the page. When I search on Google.co.nz, I only see the .com version. When I add &filter=0, I see the uk version. There are in fact a few subtle differences between the versions, and this might be enough for Google to find the UK one different.
Interesting!
I continue to see rankings drop when other sites copy a clients meta description, or words around their search phrase. I search for in quotes the “wordsbefore search phrase wordsAfterSearchPhrase” and find many scrapers.
When I make changes to my clients content, rankings often come back.
For more powerful websites, the rankings on say Google.co.nz will remain uneffected, since they are firmly in number one position, but for their rankings on Google.com where there is more competition, rankings will go down.
Google has their head in the sand and refuses to acknowledge that this is an issue. I even have a Google employee on video mentioning my SearchMasters complaint, and yet no action:
http://www.searchmasters.co.nz/articles/160/sites-disappearing-from-go ogle/
Michael,
Perhaps it just means that the scraper sites are using your optimized content to compete against your clients’ sites and move above them in the rankings? I don’t see a duplicate content penalty being applied if the ranking reductions on your clients’ sites aren’t 4 pages or more in the SERPs.
It’s also very tough to hold everything else constant (links, server errors, etc) in such a situation, so you can isolate what is actually impacting the rankings. I see fluctuations in rankings on newly optimized sites all the time and they normally come back and rank higher over time without me touching them.
Cheers,
Jim
Duplicate content has become a hot topic of late. My question is does it really harm rankings? Has anyone actually experienced first-hand any detrimental effects from using copy (pun not intended) that is elsewhere on the web or is this just a myth? I have used duplicate content on websites before (legally) and not experienced any problems – worst case scenario is that the duplicate is simply ignored.
How about the big news agencies that constantly use the same content from Associated Press? Does Google and their ilk penalise them?
Webmaster Tools allow us to tell search engines (the big three, at least) about duplicate content on our own sites (such as when we have the same content at domain.com/article and http://www.domain.com/article). And if we don’t tell them, they choose themselves. But being penalised for it…nah!
Perhaps I’ve just been lucky but I’d love to hear from someone that has actually had duplicate content be detrimental to their own website.
Wow, a quick comment turned into a bit of a rant…sorry
Daniel
I’d love to think that just because they’re Google they get away with it, but it does seem that Google mostly stick to their own rules when it comes to search.
For example stick “Search” into Google and they don’t come up top, which suggests that Yahoo is actually better for search than Google themselves… of course Google wouldn’t suggest that to be true and could simply put themselves top of the search results, but they don’t!
Thanks for the comment Tom. Google is ‘doing no evil” when it comes to ranking for ‘Search’ etc. Their page is not optimised to rank for search engine etc – obviously they are not wanting and criticism for that search result (which there would be).
Google has been waging war against all kinds of search engine spam and especially against duplicate content in all forms. The solution? Don’t rely on duplicate content as your main method of driving traffic to your site.
thanks for the enlightenment
Seems this page is having trouble ranking lol