Google says you don't need to worry about dup content on your own site

chrisv24

11 years ago

very useful link. Cheers!

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goosefrabah

11 years ago

Originally Posted by tomm

There seems to be a lot of confusion about duplicate content, people getting too much worried about some pages of their site returning the same content for different URLs.

Matt Cutts at SES SF says you don't need to worry about duplicate content on your own site unless it's on massive scale.

Spotlight Keynote With Matt Cutts #SESSF - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

I was just watching a video about this the other day. It makes perfect sense that your own content wouldn't be seen as dup, but it is nice getting a clarification from the big guy!

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1over0

11 years ago

Thats a nice and obvious thing, as everyone must be having excerpts, archives, categories and stuff like that on a blog, which might be termed duplicate. btw, this clarification could have been uch cheerful without the "on your own site"

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Aarav 11 years ago

Such a Nice Video. I seen this video and really getting unknown stuff of duplicate content. I am totally unknown from this stuffs. Thanks a lot Tomm to aware us from it.
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KingKuba

11 years ago

I was wondering about that myself recently as the main page is basically a duplicate of every "post/article" that I make...

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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

You guys are taking this out of context.

When you create duplicate pages with no canonical tag, your telling Google you could care less which page they rank & which page gets dumped into Supplemental SERPs.

If you care about your pages being in the SERPs, you better get your head out of the sand & fix the duplicate page issue. At the very least use canonical tags to tell Google which page is the one you want displayed in the SERPs.

I can see it now, new forum threads that can't figure out why Google keeps ranking the WP-Tag page instead of the target page. :rolleyes:

Good luck ignoring duplicate pages.

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tomm

11 years ago

Originally Posted by yukon

You guys are taking this out of context.

When you create duplicate pages with no canonical tag, your telling Google you could care less which page they rank & which page gets dumped into Supplemental SERPs.

If you care about your pages being in the SERPs, you better get your head out of the sand & fix the duplicate page issue. At the very least use canonical tags to tell Google which page is the one you want displayed in the SERPs.

I can see it now, new forum threads that can't figure out why Google keeps ranking the WP-Tag page instead of the target page. :rolleyes:

Good luck ignoring duplicate pages.

well maybe when google doesn't find the canonical url, their algo assigns a canonical version itself, so no one has to worry about it. Imagine how many people and site owners don't have a clue about what canonical is.

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MikeFriedman 11 years ago

Originally Posted by tomm

Imagine how many people and site owners don't have a clue about what canonical is.

The answer to that would be most.
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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by tomm

well maybe when google doesn't find the canonical url, their algo assigns a canonical version itself, so no one has to worry about it. Imagine how many people and site owners don't have a clue about what canonical is.

I already know what will happen but your welcome to do your own test.

Create 3 duplicate pages on your site & watch the SERPs.

One random page will get indexed in organic SERPs & the other two pages will get dumped into Supplemental SERPs, which will never be found by traffic.

Why would you want Google to potentially pick a crappy page like a WP-Tag page instead of the original content page? Chances are they'll pick the wrong page.

Google has the Canonical tag for a reason.

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Tuned

11 years ago

Originally Posted by tomm

There seems to be a lot of confusion about duplicate content, people getting too much worried about some pages of their site returning the same content for different URLs.

Matt Cutts at SES SF says you don't need to worry about duplicate content on your own site unless it's on massive scale.

Spotlight Keynote With Matt Cutts #SESSF - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

matt cutts not always tells s the truth, he sometimes or may be most of the times hide the truth from us..

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tomm

11 years ago

Originally Posted by siddhant91

matt cutts not always tells s the truth, he sometimes or may be most of the times hide the truth from us..

maybe yes who knows but why would he lie about this?

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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by tomm

maybe yes who knows but why would he lie about this?

You do realize the link in OP isn't Matt Cutts site, right?

Show us something where Matt says to not worry about duplicate content (from Matt not some other guys blog).

I think your taking some guys blog post out of context.

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tomm

11 years ago

Originally Posted by yukon

You do realize the link in OP isn't Matt Cutts site, right?

Show us something where Matt says to not worry about duplicate content (from Matt not some other guys blog).

I think your taking some guys blog post out of context.

it's not some dude's blog post, it's search engine watch

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yukon Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by tomm

it's not some dude's blog post, it's search engine watch

It's still some dude: hxxp://searchenginewatch.com/author/1970/danny-goodwin

I doubt all these authors own SEW: hxxp://searchenginewatch.com/authors

Even If the author of that blog post did own SEW, it's his opinion on another persons comment which I think your taking out of context.

Show me something directly from Matt C. saying to ignore duplicate content/pages on our sites. Even then I wouldn't believe it without testing again, because I've personally seen what happens to duplicate pages on the same site.
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thekencook

11 years ago

Yukon beat me to it and he's ! There was another post a few days ago I think called Canonical, Canonical, Canonical. Dupe content can NEVER be ranked equally. One post or the other will always be ranked higher than the other - so I'm not really sure what people expect to gain by having a bunch of dupe content. Yes you can, at least for a time, control more slots on Google from dupe content but not for long and you do push the chance for being penalized. It's not worth it.

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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by thekencook

Yukon beat me to it and he's ! There was another post a few days ago I think called Canonical, Canonical, Canonical. Dupe content can NEVER be ranked equally. One post or the other will always be ranked higher than the other - so I'm not really sure what people expect to gain by having a bunch of dupe content. Yes you can, at least for a time, control more slots on Google from dupe content but not for long and you do push the chance for being penalized. It's not worth it.

I've had that happen on my test site in the past, but it's very short term until Google does the corrections (re-index both pages, re-cache, etc...).

Once Google figures out the duplicate pages are both in the SERPs (and they will), they'll bury the duplicate page in Supplemental SERPs.

If no Canonical tag is on the target page, Google will display whichever page they want & there's nothing more aggravating than a WP-Tag page (wrong page) ranking in the SERPs while the original page gets buried.

I've tested this (duplicate content) on my test site with a public domain book, I got from G-Books, I actually out ranked the G-Book listing (lol) at the time & did have the short term duplicate pages on 1st page of the SERPs for the keyword, but I'm trying to tell people, it's totally short term until Google catches up with the duplicate pages.

I just can't figure out why people wouldn't use the Canonical tag, it takes all of 3 seconds.

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kiliki

11 years ago

I have a US based site and business with hundreds of pages of good content and I built a duplicate the site on a Canadian Server to serve the Canadian market and even ended the url in .ca, does anyone know if I would get penalized for duplicate content issues? I've seen a lot of conflicting answers in the past, but the new Canadian version of the site has not been ranking on keywords that our US site ranks very well on. I use a Canadian proxy to check the SERP rankings so I know Canadians are not seeing my page.

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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by kiliki

I have a US based site and business with hundreds of pages of good content and I built a duplicate the site on a Canadian Server to serve the Canadian market and even ended the url in .ca, does anyone know if I would get penalized for duplicate content issues? I've seen a lot of conflicting answers in the past, but the new Canadian version of the site has not been ranking on keywords that our US site ranks very well on. I use a Canadian proxy to check the SERP rankings so I know Canadians are not seeing my page.

If the .ca pages are indexed (I assume you checked) then they are probably buried in the organic SERPs or Supplemental SERPs (it's a new site).

Google doesn't like displaying same [exact] content on the 1st SERP page, I know it sometimes happens when the same content is on multiple domains, but overall I think the established page with the better quality links will rank better than the new scraped pages on a new domain. Mostly look at the internal/external links for the new site.

Have you built any links to the new site?

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kiliki

11 years ago

Originally Posted by yukon

If the .ca pages are indexed (I assume you checked) then they are probably buried in the organic SERPs or Supplemental SERPs (it's a new site).

Google doesn't like displaying same [exact] content on the 1st SERP page, I know it sometimes happens when the same content is on multiple domains, but overall I think the established page with the better quality links will rank better than the new scraped pages on a new domain. Mostly look at the internal/external links for the new site.

Have you built any links to the new site?

The last SEO guy who worked the .ca site for us didn't leave me much information and did not have webmastertools installed. I am in the process of adding tools to the site to gather more data, but I am guessing the answer is "maybe". Being that the link building practices I've seen on our primary site from the last guy, I am actually hoping that he did not do any link building because it may actually be harming the seo rankings with the poor quality and spammy sites he had some links placed on.