Duplicate Content

[lineops001]

...rears its head again - but for those who did not know, INTERNAL duplicate content is Ok and won't get you penalised according to Google posted on (http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=43878&st=0&p=209418&#entry209418) cre8 last Feb, but with relatively recent comments - whether it is a 'good' idea or not is more of an individual site question I guess, but the comments are insightful and interesting - if this is a revelation to those who have been stressing about duplicate content - as I have been known to do... :oops:

[Blazingpie]

"internal dup content is ok" makes no sense, as thats one of the reasons why the filter was set up in the first place, to combat spam sites that repeated pages and pages of content, etc.

However, having something like a legal disclaimer on every page is normally fine if its not too long...

[Koz]

I'm pretty sure Google is advanced enough by now to tell the difference between "some" duplicate content and total spam sites. Matt said "Vanessa was right - internal duplicate content isn't too big of an issue, and we're pretty good at sorting out which pages to rank."

[daniel]

I am convinced internal dup content is ok,

My evidence is: Look at any major news portal. They have snippets of the articles and click throughs to the full article, where the snippets are duplicated.

No penalty there !!

Daniel

[Paz]

Very interesting link, which convinces more than ever that the PR people at Google

don't know what duplicate content is
don't talk to each other
don't run websites
don't understand their own search engine.


Adam Lasnik (Cutt's #2 at Google) wrote a useful article "Deftly Dealing with Duplicate Content (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html)" where he said;

In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments ..


In my experience, "rare" means "most of the time" and the filter does lead to a ranking adjustment; especially in the case of eCommerce sites with identical titles and meta descriptions, and inconsistent navigation.

I believe this to be true because when we've taken over such websites, the first thing we've done is make the titles unique and relevant and tighten up the navigation. We've usually not been able to do anything about the simialr content on the product pages; but that doesn't seem to be an issue as Daniel says.

In any case, they've all seen an almost immediate improvement in indexing (fewer duplicate results and supplementals with the site: operator) - and later these sites have improved their rankings too.

I'd take Vanessa Fox's well-meant words with a pinch of salt.

Cheers,
Paz.

[Blazingpie]

dan, are you sure? Don't forget, if it's a major news portal they generally have great backlinks strength, and backlink stregnth can override virtually any penalty if it's strong enough. Look, im not saying it's a major major problem, but it's still not a good idea to have too much internal dupe.

[Koz]

My evidence is: Look at any major news portal. They have snippets of the articles and click throughs to the full article, where the snippets are duplicated.
I think that is the major keyword "snippets". I wouldn't concider the use of snippets to be duplicate content. I think when duplicate content becomes an issue even when its on the same site, is when content is large and is only used for search engine manipulation. Remember Google are striving to bring sites to users that will be usefull to them and snippets are usefull.