I was just searching google for reinclusion requests and found that Matt Cutts has 2 results in the serps for the same post on his blog. A closer look reveals that one url has a trailing slash and the other one doesn't. Clearly google thinks they are different pages and gives Matt double his normal space on the serps because of this.
Do you think that this might be SPAM? Perhaps he should be dropped from the index for trying to duplicate content? Or is this another tool used by the now officially recognised grey-hat seo community? s
Hehe the url without the trailing slash IS suffering a duplicate content penalty as it is missing from this search but shows up as a supplemental result in this search. Matt & google seem to have given a perfect example of the duplicate content penatly in action and working to remove duplicate content from serps while keeping the original content at number 1. Anyone with a wordpress blog should take note however and use htaccess to add a trailing slash to their urls.
Are these actually 2 different pages or just 2 ways of referring to the same page? I'm not sure it's a dup content issue because I think that dup content gets removed from google's index (at least it did when I tested it), but you can see matt's extra page depending on your search.
Google is seeing it as 2 seperate pages otherwise why would it show the same page twice? Also the page without the slash has no backlinks and the other page has 46. The duplicate content filter just stops your page showing for certain search terms. In most cases you won't get dropped from google. I have some sites with loads of duplicate content for legitimate reasons and they are fine on some searchs and don't show on others. The key to spotting duplicate content is seeing if the search term shows up when you put inverted commas around it.
I was checking a secondary kw last week and found my main page show up #2 and then checked for a page that I had added about 6 weeks earlier. My main page showed up again at #55. No black hat, its all clean, no dup. Just added a couple new pages for some newer products.
I'm pretty sure that the same url (and I mean exactly the same) cannot show up more than once in the serps. I am happy to be proved wrong if somebody can post a link to a google search result however.
Ah... so it's the way that the page is linked to that determines what google is showing. I think I see! Is this similar to the problems you get when you have inbound links for both http://mysite.com and http://www.mysite.com (distributed PR)?
Exactly. The pages are clearly the same but somewhere there must be some links with a trailing slash and some without. Yes, these are counted as 2 seperate pages (and potentially 2 seperate sites) so you should always use htaccess to redirect to the correct version of your domain name. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site.co.uk RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] Code (markup):
In my case it was the same site but with a different description. The description from the lower ranking ranking result was from the page I was looking for, but the url was my main page. Thought it was a bit odd, but I have not seen it since. Whatever the problem was, it did not last long.
This is a perfect example of URLs not being canonicalized properly. I personally use 301 redirects to handle issues such as these (to force or strip the www before a domain or to force the trailing slash at the end of a domain). If you 301 redirect all the "other" versions of your page name, all of your link popularity is funnelled into one single version, making that page more popular. This is a really strong trick that gives you an advantage over other sites now= eventually the engines will fix this problem.