DUPLICATE CONTENT Have you guys seen proof of Google penalizing a site for duplicate content ? I am trying to figire out why my site has dropped for every keyword and i know two other sites have the same some pages with the same content as me but i am the one who made the content first
Looks like you have 30k pages indexed in the main and supplemental Db: http://www.google.com/search?q=site...ient=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official Doing the same search in the main index returns 12k pages: http://www.google.com/search?ie=utf8&oe=utf8&num=10&q=site:www.662mob.com&lr=lang_en Looking at the results from the first site: command you see a lot of pages that only have the URL listed, no Cache links and a link to "Similar" . These pages are most likely in Google's supplemental index and are not carrying or passing any PageRank. Drill down on some of those pages. 1. Notice that the amount of unique content on most of them is a small percentage of the overall text on the pages. 2. You have a lot of identical <title> tags (I didn't look at the header tags). 3. Your internal links are the same on many of the pages. 4. You have a lot of URLs that are not search engine friendly. 5. You have a lot of indexed pages that are just for sending to a friend - modules.php?name=new . . . . . . . Play around with the site: command and analyze the pages. Look at them from an automated bot's perspective. Also look at the robots.txt info at Google on how to use disallow to keep certain pages out of the index. If you are not good with mod-rewrite, there are some experts here at DP that may be able to help you with making the urls SEF. Hope this helps. -jay
Yes, Google is very good a catching duplicate content. They will slap a penalty on your site real fast and it will be gone. Thats good advice, classifieds.
This is why all the travel sites have taken a hit. Basically that is biggest on displaying duplicate content and many of those sites are really hurting right now.
If copyscape can determine % of content similar among pages, and Google readily admits in their patent filing that they'll be doing "whois" type lookups it certainly stands to reason that they can determine duplicate content and where it originated from. classifieds - awesome information and helpful post!
The Google duplicate content filter is absolutely true. Few of our sites have been hit although they have real useful content, different Whois and different hosts. I think Google has advanced pretty much in finding duplicate content in the last year.
I am pretty sure that Google uses whois information because it (and others) are visiting sites I am developing before there are any links to them from anywhere else. Not certain what else they might be using Whois info for but they seem to be using it alright.
Is it ok , if two of my sites share a little content.... is there a chance that one or both get penalised for duplicate content?
Yes BUT this is real buyer beware advice. It depends on what you define as sharing "a little content" and it depends on whether the Search Engine's definition of "a little content" matches yours. I have a number of sites which share some content but have a lot of different content as well. Never had any problems BUT I am not trying to get search engine placements for the pages that have similar content (if you see what I mean). I would say that you can risk having some similar content on two different sites as long as it's not much and as long as there is a significant amount of different content on the site. I would also not duplicate content that you are using to target search results that are important to you. But all of that is a fine line to trod so you may prefer not to risk it.
Thanks. What if I change the domain name of my site. The new site will have same content (word 4 word) like the old site. I may remove the earlier one, but it will remain in Google's cache for sometime. What happens in such a case?
In that case you should be using a 301 permanent redirect. That tells google that the site/page has moved. If you want to preserve the PageRank of the interior pages you will have to write a redirector to forward the individual pages from the old domain to the new. Example: www . old-site.com/interior-page-10.html gets redirected to www . new-site.com/interior-page-10.html . -jay
Sometimes nothing, sometimes very, very, bad things. You could avoid a duplicate content penalty by 301 redirecting from the old domain, so that's not a huge problem but the new domain could easily end up sandboxed. Either way you have huge problems with things like link popularity which is built up to the old domain name. Not something that I would do unless I had absolutely no other choice. I'm sure there's someone who has a foolproof method for doing it with no problems but I don't know it.