October 16, 2005

Google Update : Duplicate Content Penalty

Google is Dancing, and is going to hit hard, probably. I see over the different datacenters different results for some of my sites, and the effects are, for some of my sites horrible. I must confess, that I used on some of those sites a lot of duplicate content, because I thought, the more content the better, even if its the same, but defined by another url, and it was an easy way of programming some sites.

The update is still going on, and it seems that Google is testing their new filters, not every datacenter is using the new, what I think is the “duplicate content penalty”, yet. Maybe they will not follow through, or be a bit milder in their judgement, but you are warned, there is something going on with sites that create this duplicate content. And some of the datacenters are showing the new type of results already to the public.

New times for webmasters, and especially those with dynamic generated sites, will have to rethink about setting up a structure, and they have to do it quickly. Dynamic sites and navigation through a lot of data without creating the same content under different urls will become a challenge.

Forum owners who use phpBB, the king of duplicate content, especially those with the SEO hacks and mod_rewrite stuff will have to think about “topics”, “posts”, “sorting” and “search” urls, can maybe, they can with a creative robots.txt, do some damage control. On the webmasterworld forum, I read that osCommerce sites are also hit hard, by this new duplicate filter.

But my guess is that webmasters, solving this problem right now, will be ahead in a few weeks again, when de duplicates are gone from the index.

Categories and item structures, the relation between items and categories, pagination…. robots.txt

Ok, To Work !, because it is my guess, that, even if Google will be a bit milder in the next few days, it is going to happen.

Want to see the Dance? : http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php

Want to read the thread on webmasterworld?

Look here:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/31509.htm

or here:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/31509-1-15.htm

They are both the same page, they are duplicates, and linked from the main Google Search News Forum page.

In the thread it self however, the pagination routine sometimes generates a 31509-1-15 and sometimes a 31509, depending on the truncation of the number of page links. Its a bug. If you have plenty of those bugs, you are out.

Something to do…

p.s. I see (and read) that some of the spammy (scraper and copycats) websites are gone if this update goes on. Good.
But maybe Google has to think about all those innocent webmasters who accidently scrape and copy themselves…

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