Duplicated content – the Myth is busted by Google | eCommerce and Marketing News & Tips

Duplicated content – the Myth is busted by Google

Google has been on the warpath to dispel some of the rumors that have been circulating the net about their policy towards duplicate content. Not only have various videos been made to address this issue, but several have been created to specifically explain what the real policy towards websites that post duplicate content for the sake of increased Google rankings.

Greg Grothaus of the Search Quality Team is one of the many members of Google that has taken the offensive on this issue, and posted a new video on his team’s YouTube channel to explain the difference. It gives a great, simple explanation about the differences between duplicate content and spam, and denies some of the information that has been posted online.

No penalty for duplicated content

The number one point that Grothaus has cleared up is that Google does not have it in their policy to penalize sites that have been listed as having duplicate content. The fact that many sites will end up pushed out of the initial search results for repetition is not meant as a punishment for webmasters trying to push their ranking up. Rather, it is a direct consequence of an automated system.

Have you ever seen the message on Google search results that states that some websites have omitted in an attempt to offer the most relevant searches? This is due to duplicate content, but it does not actually eliminate the website. Rather, the searcher can rerun the query to include those websites if they choose. According to Grothaus, this is just the way that the search engine is set up in order to offer a more efficient way of searching.

“What’s actually happening, is that we’re looking at the query that the user’s doing, and we’re saying that we want diversity in the results we’re going to show a user,” Grothaus explains in his video.

Duplicated content is NOT spam

The truth is, while quite a lot of duplicated content is meant as a means of pushing a website up the Google rankings scale, it is not meant as spam. Spam is, in and of itself, dishonest advertising. It is a means of taking advantage of various systems for the sake of creating heavier traffic without more honest means of marketing. Because of the fine line between what constitutes average viral marketing and spam, this system was put in place in addition to monitoring teams.

Spam sites will be penalized

But sites that offer spam instead of quality content are being penalized using a different monitoring system than duplicate content, and will likely not show up in Google search results regardless of the searcher’s personal preferences. That is what makes it a different issue. The company maintains that webmasters and spammers are being judged on different scores, and that it is the spam sites that are penalized.

Canonical Tag – the solution presented by Search Engines

In the end, it is obvious that the most beneficial thing a webmaster can do is use a ‘canonical‘ version of a URL, as Google videos have explained. This is creating the simplest URL to link back for your entire site. This will make is easier for Google to sort and choose the right one to give priority to. While you can use more than one without being penalized, it will dilute your own traffic results, and so it is not recommended.

You also have to consider marketing implication that come along with duplicate content. Having more than one URL will make it more difficult to create a brand and increase customer or visitor loyalty. It is all about having a user-unfriendly URL, which will be like penalizing yourself…Google won’t have to make it difficult to attract a higher ranking when you are putting the bullet in your own foot. Which is likely why they aren’t wasting the time or manpower to do something about it.

Before creating canonical links, there are a few rules you should follow:

· Always keep it linked within a single domain.
· Keep pages names similar, even if they are not identical.
· Create 301 redirects from non-canonical URLs, in order to direct users from similar protocols. (optional)

When you are dealing with similar pages but multiple domains, keep in mind that this is irrelevant to the duplicate content issue. Again, Google does not penalize these pages, but it will prioritize. Even if they are made for different countries, regions, languages, or with slight differences in services, Google will automatically choose what they think to be the ‘right’ link to offer as a search result. This is done whether or not it really is the best link.

You will also likely miss out on the ‘tabbed user interface’, which allows Google to expand certain website results to offer different pages within that domain. When you have multiple domains they can’t track and host those extra pages, which costs you clicks. This will, inevitably, hurt your ranking, which would be counterproductive to your original plan of creating the domains.

See the problem?

(If you own a Zencart site, you may want to check our Canonical Link for Zencart article)a