Duplicate Content

by Sapphire (March 25, 2005)

If you really want to build your site up, there are certain totally innocent things you might want to do that could hurt it in the search engines. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced anyone’s sure what those are. For the most part, I do think if you are building sites with your visitors in mind, that coincides with what the SE’s want.

But one thing I’ve never completely understood is the duplicate content penalty. Here’s a WebProWorld thread on Duplicate Content that gives you an idea just how many questions there are, and how little we’re sure of.

For example, what about blogs and syndication? Presumably, Google can tell a feed from the original feed source, and know you’re not just mirroring yourself everywhere. But what about dynamic scripts you provide for your visitor’s convenience? I’m under the impression that these scripts are tolerated until/unless they reach a point of such redundancy that Google slaps a “devalue” on the script itself, which in turn hurts your website to a degree, if you’re running the script. But I’m not sure this is how it works. Maybe it’s just that the original script provided something fresh and valuable, but like a surplus of gold, it loses value as others slap it on their site as well. Maybe it’s not really Google “doing” anything, but just a natural fluxuation, like currency.

I suspect we have less to worry about on the duplicate content issue than we think. Some redundancy is actually very useful and helpful. For example, how many sites have very similar terms and conditions pages, because that’s how contract law works? I would hope the SE’s somehow avoid labelling such pages as duplicate content, but I’m not sure how they can tell the difference. Anyone have a clue?

Posted in SEO
Subscribe to the feed or email updates