SEO’s, myself included, have always beleived that duplicate content can harm your Search Engine Optimisation campaign. Now, Greg Grothaus of Google’s Search Quality team as dismissed that by addressing the large number of duplicate content / sites that web site owners and SEO’s face when trying to rank well in Google.
Greg begins by telling us that Google does NOT penalise for sites having duplicate content. Of course, this doesnt mean that duplicate content will have a negative effect on your campaign, but Google won’t penalise you for it.
So how did the myth get started?
Basically Greg tells us in the Video. When you do a Google search for any term you may have seen the following message.
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 20 you already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
Basically, Greg thinks that this message created the myth that the content being omitted from the results is “duplication”. Greg stresses that duplicate content is not an ongoing process and is most often just a factor on a case by case or “by query” basis.
So what is duplicate content?
According to Greg, he gives the following examples of URLs, all with the same content:
Google will not penalise your site for using more than one of the above, but there are other issues that could negatively affect website rankings. The most damaging is the dilution of link juice. If you have back links that point to several different URLs, from the same content, it makes it difficult to accumulate link juice to help increase popularity and page rank.
Canonical URLs
To stay away from the above issues, Greg suggest using a cononical version of your URL. What does this mean? It means the simplest and most significant form. He suggests picking one for each page and use it consistently for internal links. He suggests adding 301 redirects (permanent redirect) to all non-canonical URLs
Multiple Domains
Greg also discussed the issue of multiple domains. People often have different domains to target different audiences in another country and/or language. The main concern for SEO’s is how your reputation can be distributed across multiple Web sites. Simple, Google will only show what its algorithm assumes to be the best page for a specific search query. This can be based on the location of the search user at the origin of the search. As Greg puts it – Google thinks multiple domains are “great”!
The information in the video and this blog post is based on Greg’s presentation from the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, California.
