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
Google to allow Cross Domain Canonical Tag
by Stuart Morrison
Google announced at last week’s SMX East that they intend to all allow cross domain support for the canonical tag by the end of the year. This means that if you have more than one website you can tell Google that a page on one domain is actually a duplicate of a page on another site.
This change will no doubt be widely welcomed by webmasters and SEO professionals. Websites currently run the risk of being penalised for duplicate content. And because Google can never be certain which site originally produced the content (only that which it indexed first), the wrong site may be penalised. Using a cross domain canonical tag will help prevent this from happening.
Of particular interest to Absorb is the use of duplicate content in ‘white label’ sites. Retail and travel sites often provide content to ‘white label’ affiliates, who effectively plug-in content taken from the parent site. This use of duplicate content has an obvious risk of damage to rankings to the original site. By using a cross domain canonical tag, we would be able to remove this danger and preserve rankings.
A few commentators are pointing to possible downsides of the new tag. Some voices suggest it will be a means to hijack content. However if, as we hope, Google ensures strict rules, e.g. that all sites are verified in Webmaster Tools, such a scenario is unlikely.
Interestingly Bing and Yahoo have similarly shown interest in supporting the use of a canonical tag, but only within the same domain.
Posted: October 12, 2009 @ 11:14 pm
Tags: Affiliates, Commentators, Domain Support, Google, No Doubt, Risk, SEO, Smx, Strict Rules, Tag, Travel Site, Travel Sites, Voices, Webmaster Tools, White Label, Yahoo