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Google And Duplicate Content
by
Richard Lowe, Jr.
Web Address: http://www.internet-tips.net
I've
been following the discussion about Google and mirrored
information for some time. It is "common knowledge"
that Google penalizes page rank when it determines
that content is duplicated somewhere else. In fact,
I've read many experts stating that there should
be no duplicate domain names and no duplicate content
anywhere.
On the face of it the arguments appear to be sound.
Google obviously has several billion pages in it's
database and could, it appears, easily determine
if content is duplicated. It also seems, again on
the face of it, that it's reasonable to check for
duplicate content, as this is the "mark of
a spammer" and not necessary on the web with
hyperlinking available. At least, this is the common
wisdom.
However, sometimes what seems reasonable and possible
is not: not by a long shot.
Let's begin with the technical side of things. You've
got domain x and domain y with exactly the same
content. How on earth would Google be able to figure
that out? Let's say Google had 3 billion pages in
it's database. To compare every page to every page
would be an enormous task - quadrillions of comparisons.
Now, if site x had page "page1" which
linked to site y which also had "page1",
then it would be possible for Google to determine
the duplicate content. Conceivably, it could check
this out.
Not only is the task enormous, but the benefit is
so tiny as to be insignificant. Duplicate content
does not imply in any way shape or form spamming.
In actual fact, a duplicate site is generally going
to lower page rank of BOTH sites. Instead of having
100 links to one site, there will presumably be
50 links to one and 50 to another. This would tend
(all things being equal) to lower the page ranking
of both sites. So Google gains nothing by this incredible
expenditure of resources.
There are several reasons for duplicate content
which have nothing to do with spamming. Sometimes
the content is actually duplicated, and sometimes
it's just that there are several different domains
(at least the www and non-www versions) for the
same website
Mirroring a site for load balancing - This is very
common. The purpose is to split up the traffic between
two copies of the site.
Mirroring for region - Sometimes site mirroring
is done simply to make it more efficient on the
internet backbone itself. You might put an identical
copy of a site in Europe, for example, to reduce
traffic across the Atlantic, which should make it
faster in European countries.
Viral marketing - It's extremely common to allow
other sites to republish articles in return for
a link.
Different domain names - Sometimes a site might
be referenced on many different domain names. You
might want to allow the .com, .net and .org versions
of the name to all work the same, you might allow
for common misspellings or you might cover different
keywords (sewing-tips and sewing-secrets are examples
of possible combinations).
Different domain names for different markets - you
might also want to reference your site by different
names in order to target different markets. You
could, for example, have a site about search engine
optimization and want to target both SEO and web
designers. Thus domain names like seo.com and webdesign.com
would make sense.
www - Any good webmaster knows his or her site needs
to be referenced with and without the www.
Okay, so what's the smart thing to do? Well, it
is possible that search engines do compare a limited
number of pages to check for duplication. They could
certainly check if someone reported something, and
they might check directly linked pages (although
this is still a heck of a lot of overhead for very
little benefit).
Of course, Google and the other search engines can
account for a hefty percentage of the traffic received
by a site. In fact, sometimes the number can exceed
70 percent. So it's wise to spend some time ensuring
that you are totally clean when it comes to search
engine optimization. In other words, a technician
from any search engine should be able to examine
your site down to it's smallest detail and find
no evidence of any kind of search engine spamming
(attempting to get higher rankings by unethical
means). This is absolutely critical to a site's
survival for the long term.
Keeping that in mind, here's what I tend to do.
Multiple domains - Using multiple domains to the
same site has a tremendous number of advantages.
Thus, I tend to follow the advice given by others:
take advantage of permanent redirection. In other
words, set up a redirection (a 301 status code)
which simply tells the browser "this page has
moved, proceed to this page, and the move is permanent.
This tells the spider about the redirection with
no possibility of misunderstanding, yet allows for
the multiple domains.
Republished articles - I allow others to republish
many of my articles, and at this time I have records
of over 10,000 of them all over the internet on
thousands of web sites. This is not a problem, as
these articles are sent in text format. The webmaster
must then drop this text into his site, which requires
some reformatting and shuffling around. Thus, the
finished articles may have the same text but the
formatting is very, very different. This is a highly
respected method of gaining a large number of incoming
links: I give you something (an article, i.e., content)
and you give me something (a link back to my site).
Mirroring - I haven't needed to do this yet, so
I have no advice as to what to do if a site requires
actual, physical multiple versions of itself. I
would tend to just do it overtly (out in the open)
and not worry about it.
Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips
And Secrets at http://www.internet-tips.net
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