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Avatar Posted By: mpilatow 261 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://piloseo.com)
Category: Google SEO
Google Webmaster Tools seems to show Googlebot actively seeking duplicate content across similar domain names.
6 Comments     

Comments

from g1smd 261 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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You say the pages that did not exist were indexed and showed in the SERPs.


Did those entries show as URL-only entries, or as full entries with a title and snippet?

from mpilatow 261 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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They did not show in the SERPs but they showed up when I ran a site:domain search operator. They showed up with the exact title and description as they appear on the site that actually has those URL's as well as the URL extension. The only difference was that they had the root domain of the site that did not have those URL's.

For example

This is how the data appears for the site that actually has the page

Title: New Product: Site1.com
Description: This page offers New Product.
URL: www.site1.com/new-product

This is what showed up in the site search for the site where those pages did not exist

Title: New Product: Site1.com
Description: This page offers New Product.
URL: www.site2.com/new-product

Everything was the same except the root domain. I have followed up with everyone and these pages never existed and GWT shows they all produced 404 errors. In fact now only one of these pages shows up and it obviously does not work.

from floppy 261 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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I have written a few post on avoding duplicate content using an .htaccess. It was targeted specifically at wordpress, but the same concepts apply.

Avoid Duplicate Content with Wordpress

from mpilatow 261 days ago #
Votes: 0 | Vote:
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Yeah, the thing is this was not duplicate content. The pages only existed on one site. It looks like Google found that the domains had very similar names and decided to crawl known pages to see if there was duplicate content. It got hit with 404 errors because the pages did not exist but for some reason indexed them (for at least one day). From my point of view it seems like Googlebot has some sort of process that commands it to purposefuly go out and try to find duplicate content on sites that closely resemble each other in terms of domain name.

from Sebastian 260 days ago #
Votes: 1 | Vote:
+ -

It seems you get close to an answer over there:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/ae15f7d63c60721a/
;)

I bet this has nothing to do with dupe fishing.

from mpilatow 260 days ago #
Votes: 1 | Vote:
+ -

Thanks for the assistance Sebastian. Like I said over there, this just gives me more ammunition to fight the developer on this front.


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