Published: Jun 05, 2009 - 09:22 am
Story Found By: amabaie 1082 Days ago
Category: SEO
11 Comments
11 Comments
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Comments
I think that if elements like navigation are enough to cause a group of pages to be viewed as duplicate content, the real issue is lack of content. Youd have to have some pretty empty pages for a search engine to have a problem with the fact that they all contain the words "Home," "About Us," and "Contact Us."
Yeah, I think the question is what happens when you have a number of these elements all on the same page? You might not want to change the navigation (or at least the basic navigation), but there might be other things you want to change.
From the article:"Duplicate content is one thing that will get you penalized for sure though. In fact, a duplicate content penalty could cause your site to drop out of the search results like a stone."This is simply not true and just adds to the SEO myths that abound. Theres no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.There is, in fact, duplicate content filters. For the type of duplicate content mentioned in the article, its rarely ever a problem. Id sure love to see a real life example of headers and footers that got a site penalized as that just doesnt ring true to me. Same with disclaimers and the like. Those things are not a problem whatsoever for search engines, and your site does not in any way get penalized for having them.
Jill, since Google sifts out some pages in a batch when theyre perceived to be too similar, that is absolutely a penalty as far as Im concerned. If my client has fifty pages and 30 of them arent indexed, how can that, from a client perspective, not be considered a penalty. Is that a matter of parsing words? Sure. Yet perspective of the client is as important as any other in our industry. It really does come down to quality content making a difference in these situations, yet getting clients to allow us to get a lot of content on pages is almost always a losing battle. Theyd rather just walk away in a huff moaning about the "dumb Google rules".
AlanBleiweiss said:If my client has fifty pages and 30 of them arent indexed, how can that, from a client perspective, not be considered a penalty. They do get indexed though. The type of duplicate content talked about in the article doesnt stop those pages from being indexed.
Extremely concerned with the SEO community that enabled this erroneous article to go hot.
No such thing as duplciate content exist. I have a proof. Even Google assign PR to duplciate content site. And this website has no trust at all. no backlinks. :) no visitors. But has PR :P
Its the penalty word which is a problem :-) There is certainly a "similar content" filter, and Patricia even says it herself in the comments "if you have less unique content on your pages than those template words, you will pay a price" it is the uniqueness of the rest of the page that is important.
This article is mostly wrong as it starts with the wrong premise, that there is a duplicate content penalty.
Agreeing with Jill. In addition, there are many IR papers that discuss filtering out "boilerplate" content such as navigation and footers from the Recall portion.
Im with Jill. Also, Im sure Google can tell whats content and whats navigation / sidebars etc