CLEARED UP: Google's Greg Gauthaus delivers the good news
A post yesterday on Google Webmaster Central by Greg Grothaus attempts to clear up confusion about duplicate content.
Like most other SEO professionals, I’ve been chanting the mantra that “Duplicate Content is the 8th Deadly Sin” for a long time now. Greg’s post certainly doesn’t give carte blanche to those lowlifes who would copy the dictionary on to a website and call it their own in a bid to monopolise the search results, but it does show that not all duplicated content is a bad thing.
The official Google line is that they DO NOT penalise duplication, they penalise SPAM, and spammers have been known to use duplicate content.
We’re currently working on creating a sitemap for one of our clients as part of the strategy to get their site better indexed by the search engines. With many millions of pages on the site — even after excluding obvious duplicates — there are still a few examples which slip through the net. These are usually the result of different paths to the same content, mainly because customers use the site in individual ways.
What Greg says is that Google thinks this is fine; but, he argues, web masters should strive whereever possible to reduce duplication because …
- It reduces the inherent authority of “page uniqueness”
- It means searches can return user-hostile URLs
- It spreads the “link-juice” of the duplicated pages
- It means the search engines waste time indexing duplicated pages, and
- It’s easy to fix with 301 redirects and the Google canonical tag
However, innocent duplication — especially where it is the product of a legitimate function of the website, such as breadcrumb navigation — will NOT be penalised.
Posted: September 16, 2009 @ 1:08 pm