Hi, When I first started my site I added some content that I found to fill up pages. This is not "stolen content", but more or the less taken from one of the sites that I decided to promote. At that time I wasn't aware of the duplicate content penalty, so now I am working on taking the left overs all out. It leaves me with a couple of questions: Can duplicate content hurt my entire site, or just the page the content appears on? If I add new content to these duplicate pages, will Google see that and give my site the appropriate ranking? I am not sure if my site is penalized, but I have a bad feeling that some pages are. Thanks for all the answers, Giorgio
It really can hurt.... 'coz duplicate contents are penalized and put to supplemental pages.... you can check whether you have duplicates by copyscape.com
If a lot of your content is copied from other sites, sure that will hurt your entire site, not just the page the copied content is on. It's probably a percentage thing. I'd shy away from having more then 10% duplicate content. Others say 30%.
It's easy to find out if the website is "penalized". Just check out how much of it is indexed. Go to google and in the search bar, type in site:www.YourSite.com. That will show you all the pages that are indexed in google. You can compare that to how many pages you actually have. And you should look for the supplemental index indication. That shows you what to look for. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that it's put in supplemental because it's duplicate. It could be put in supplemental because your website doesn't have enough incoming links. But in your case, it's probably the duplicate content. HTH, MR
Thanks for these answers, I think to have found my real problem here: I have some pages which appear in the supplemental index because I used URL's for the ratings. For example: http://www.mysite.com/reviews/myreview/ http://www.mysite.com/reviews/myreview/rate/1/ http://www.mysite.com/reviews/myreview/rate/2/ http://www.mysite.com/reviews/myreview/rate/3/ etc. All URL's go to the same page, thus content for all is identical, so I presume that all my reviews are penalized and put into the supplemental index because of that. Basically every review on my site can have 5 different rates, which means that there's 5 different URL's to each page. I have now added the rel="nofollow" tag to the specific anchors, but will this be enough to get re-indexed, or should I do more about it.
There's no reason to have multiple URL's for the same page. Personally i'd implement a single URL solution rather then having no-follow tags.
Yes, I would also do that, but the URL gives the rating to the review. by reloading the page. I have just found the following solution: User-agent: * Disallow: */rate/ Which should work well.
unless your entire site is copied duplicate content is not as scary as some people make it out to be.....its a filter that google implements to make sure that the same content will not rank for a search...
HI i have same problem my site also showing that supplemental result so how can i get rid of this problem give some suggestions syed