Double Your Trouble: Google Highlights Duplication Issues
By: Chris "Silver" Smith
2007-09-12
Maile Ohye posted a great piece on Google Webmaster Central on the effects of duplicate content as caused by common URL parameters. There is great information in that post, not least of which it validates exactly what a few of us have stated for a while: duplication should be addressed because it can water down your PageRank.
 | | Double Your Trouble |
Maile suggests a few ways of addressing dupe content, and she also reveals a few details of Googles workings that are interesting, including:
- Unnecessarily long URLs are unattractive, and might reduce chances that a user would click through to your page. While this sounds like a subjective opinion thats a bit counter-intuitive (because one could assume that users focus more on link titles than length of URLs), its quite possible that Google would have done enough experimentation during their usability testing to know for sure that longer URLs might actually have a negative impact on click-through rates. So, avoid longer URLs if possible in your application design!
- When deciding what to display from your site for a users search, if Google detects duplicate content matching the users query, theyll group all the dupe pages into a cluster, and then apply some methods to choose which of your pages would be the best choice to present to their searcher.
- They attempt to focus the collective link popularity or PageRank from all members of a cluster on your site to one page. This is slightly odd, since it runs counter to her earlier statement that duplication can cause link popularity dilution. Likely, this means that there are cases when Google can find it difficult to cluster all dupes from a site, so its still best to reduce duplication rather than solely rely upon their algorithms to handle it for you.
- She suggests using a Sitemap to inform them of the primary URLs of a site, which suggests that Google may be using the sitemaps as a prime indicator when trying to select a canonical URL for a particular cluster. I note that while using a sitemap could help Google select which of your dupe pages to present to a user, it doesnt really solve your entire dupe problem " you should still try to use additional methods to manage dupes.
Mailes suggestions reiterate some of the de-duplication advice Ive previously given, and Ive also suggested having your site resolve to a single domain name to reduce duplication (along with Googles Matt Cutts, who also recommends domain canonicalization).
Each of the search engines handle duplication issues a little differently, making it desirable to use best practices to manage the issue, if you really want to improve your sites natural search performance.
Comments
Tag: Google, Canonicalization, duplicate content, duplication, SEO
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About
the Author:
Chris formerly headed up the Advanced Technology Department for Verizon Superpages.com (later spun off under Idearc Media), where he worked for ten years, specializing in patent-pending work in mapping, local search, analytics, and SEO. As the natural search optimization expert for Idearc, he founded and chaired the company's SEO Council. Chris is currently a Lead Search Strategist for Netconcepts, a search optimization firm. Chris is a regular columnist for Search Engine Land, covering the 'local search' beat. He also blogs for Natural Search Blog, and speaks at industry conferences such as Search Engine Strategies.
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