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Sphinn Home » SEO
Yes Virginia You Can Hurt Yourself With Duplicate Content
SEO News Source: http://www.wolf-howl.com
Published: Sep 16, 2008 - 08:02 am
Story Found By: NickWilsdon 1243 Days ago
Category: SEO
Michael Gray refutes the post last week by Google, entitled Demystifying the “duplicate content penalty”. In his opinion you really can hurt your site with duplicate content. He gives some examples where you may want to pay close attention to this happening.
 Comments15 Comments  

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from DarkMatter 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 0

The original post did touch on these issues briefly:In step 2, Google’s idea of what the "best" URL is might not be the same as your idea. If you want to have control over whether www.example.com/skates.asp?color=black&brand=riedell or www.example.com/skates.asp?brand=riedell&color=black gets shown in our search results, you may want to take action to mitigate your duplication. One way of letting us know which URL you prefer is by including the preferred URL in your Sitemap.

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from kimber 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 1

okay...who the hell is virginia anyway?

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from sza 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I don’t understand "Limit the number of paths Google can use to find your content".If your content can be found in its full form exclusively on the single post page, under one and only one URL (as advised two paragraphs earlier), than it will always be just the same content with the same URL (no duplication), regardless of where Googlebot finds it.In this case, shouldn’t the opposite be true? The more ways that exact same content can be found, the better? The same post being linked from several relevant categories should have nothing to do with duplication issues.

Avatar Moderator
from graywolf 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 0

@sza if the post is in three categories and you have the posts configured to display the entire post, the entire post be on three category archive pages and the single post page.

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from Harith 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 0

kimber"okay...who the hell is virginia anyway?"The name is Virgina. She must be the gorgeous woman living not far from where Graywolf live :-)

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from graywolf 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 0

@kimber its a US phrase, help me i’m linking to the wiki

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from sza 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 0

graywolf, that’s OK, but after someone follows your first advice, the third becomes unnecessary and even counterproductive, the full content only being available in the single post page (and not in the archives, category or tag pages).

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from graywolf 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 0

@sza if you follow classic reporting or viral sticky content styles or writing you lead with your best idea first instead of making your reader slog thru till the end to see if it’s worth it. So there is a high likelyhood that the top KWD phrase(s) will be in the title and first paragraph. So even if you use the snippet you still run the risk of it appearing in multiple category pages, and have a higher likelyhood of google not getting it right. if you follow my way it’s only in one archive and the single post and google does a much better job getting it right.

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from Halfdeck 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 2

<div style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; background-color: #ffffff">"because IMHO you really can hurt yourself with duplicate content."<div></div><div>Where did Susan say you couldn’t hurt yourself with duplicate content?</div><div></div><div>Dupe URLs watering down link equity, bandwidth hogging, wasting crawl "points" on duplicate URLs so that GB will leave before getting to important pages... I don’t see a "don’t worry be happy" message in her post anywhere.</div><div></div><div>And the advice in this post is SEO 101, a regurgitation of Michael’s old Wordpress dupe content vid post.</div><div></div><div>Want to prevent dupe content?</div><div></div><div>http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html</div></div>

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from Harith 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 0

DarrenSlatten"-World’s Greatest SEO"Did you mean "-Los Angeles Greatest SEO" :-)

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from kerimorgret 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Don’t forget, he’s Las Vegas’s Greatest SEO too.He ought to take a lesson in duplicate content as well.http://www.google.com/search?q=%22When+you+hire+us,+you+are+not+getting+someone+we+trained+or+sub%22&filter=0

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from JohnHGohde 1243 Days ago #
Votes: -2

It was a slam dunk to sphinn this write-up.  Viva La Difference!

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from NickWilsdon 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 0

@DarrenSlatten I think Harith is hinting that there are other SEOs around the world who aren’t bad either. "World’s Greatest SEO" sounds a bit like the US baseball "World Series". But you do have the English SERP. I’ll have to work on the same result in Cyrillic :D Err...yes Morgret does seem to be confusing your brand with SEO Champ. Ouch, that’s got to hurt ;) Good comments though, thanks.

Avatar Moderator
from kerimorgret 1243 Days ago #
Votes: -1

@NickWilsdon I’m not confusing Darren with the chump, and I apologize for the insult. I misread, and thought that Harith was referring to SEO Champ, considering SEO Champ is from LA/Vegas (depending on which site you look at).

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from Harith 1243 Days ago #
Votes: 0

NickWilsdon,"I think Harith is hinting that there are other SEOs around the world who aren’t bad either."Exactly :-)

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