Thursday, December 21, 2006

Google and Duplicate Content

One of the biggest issues for web designers and SEO professions is that of duplicate content. What is duplicate content? Will it get your web site banned? Will it get your web site penalized?

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog has posted much needed information about duplicate content. Adam Lasnik answers the following questions:

What is duplicate content?

What isn't duplicate content?

Why does Google care about duplicate content?

What does Google do about it?

How can Webmasters proactively address duplicate content issues?

The answers to this last question are particularly useful. Lasnik lists specific things web designers can do to address duplicate content, such as:

+ Use 301s permanent redirects.

+ Keep internal linking consistent, don't link to /page/ and /page and /page/index.htm.

+ If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article.

+ Use the preferred domain feature of Google's webmaster tools. This allows you to tell Google whether they should link to www.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com. otherwise Google might link to each individually and see the same page as being a duplicate of itself.

+ Minimize boilerplate repetition. If, for example, you must put a disclaimer at the bottom of each page, just include a short summary with a link to a separate page that has the complete disclaimer.

Plus five other suggestions. This is a blog post all web designers, SEOs, or anyone involved with web design should read, and have bookmarked.

4 Comments:

At Friday, December 07, 2007 1:36:00 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Steve,
Duplicate content is a real issue with syndicated newsletters. 300 links get hacked back to 20 by Google because it's all the same content. I solved that problem with James D Brausch's http://www.ArtemisPro.com article submission software. Can't recommend it highly enough.

 
At Saturday, June 07, 2008 6:58:00 AM , Blogger Unknown said...

yes i agree with it too, that duplicate content is really a big issue , and i got a very intresting software which really check the data and scores it and depending on that we can change our content...these copywriting software is Glyphius (www.glyphius.com) has helped guide me to know what is really effetive online

 
At Friday, August 29, 2008 10:34:00 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Duplicating content has become an issue. This isn't good for google. But what abut sending out press releases. If you want to get a press release out there all of the content is the same. Isn't that considered duplicate content??

 
At Friday, September 26, 2008 6:51:00 PM , Blogger SteveH said...

I use a lot of press releases and have never had a problem. I think it is important that you first post the press release on your web site, and be sure it is included in your site map (for Google to read). That way your site isidentified as the original owner.

However, there have been times I've fortogetten to do this and it still has not been a problem. I've not seen Google penalize press releases as duplicate content.

Think of this. If Google jumped on press releases and penalized the you for duplicate content, the way for a competitor to penalize your web site would be for them to duplicate and publish on the web lots of copies of your press releases... What an idea!

Wait a minute! That would give you A LOT of free publicity. So it probably isn't such a good idea after all. I think I'll be hoping my competition tries it.

The point is, even if there is a duplicate content penalty, the advantage of having tons of free publicity far outweights the loss of a page to a duplicate content penalty.

 

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