Google Demystifies Duplicate Content – Kind a Sort a
Written by Jason on October 1st, 2008
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This is going to be one short post but with the amount of times this topic seems to resurface I thought I would do my due diligence and share it with you. The gist of it all is that they are indicating that there is no real penalty BUT (and a big one) there can be problems.
Check out the post at…
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
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That’s great and that’s what I’ve always said: duplicate content is not that bad and won’t get you at the bottom of search engines. You just want to add some value to that duplicate content.
People are so afraid of big G, it’s worrying.
Great Post Cow…
Ben – Im scared of the big G. Being high in their rankings for some sites makes me good money
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Hi there,
I’m just wondering if you set up multiple squeeze pages for your Adwords campaigns which are substantially the same but just vary the keywords or phrases to those that you targeting in your campaigns -would that be regarded as duplicate content?
My site http://innovativerealestateinvestments.com used to be #4 for the kwd phrase “positive real estate” but now ranks #28.(in google australia).
Cheers,
Tamar
Yes it is but what I do to easily eliminate that issue is I block those pages via my robots.txt file.
So for example, the domain with the PPC would have a robots.txt file like this…
Start –>
Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /temp/
Disallow: /*.gif$
Disallow: /*.jpg$
Disallow: /*.zip$
Disallow: /*.doc$
Disallow: /*.exe$
Disallow: /*.pdf$
Disallow: /PPCfolder/
< -- End
The “Disallow: /PPCfolder/” tells Google (and the other search engines) that they are not allowed access to this folder (directory) or the contents within that directory and there for will not count them in the index and not count as duplicate content.
This does not prevent the Google Adwords bot from spidering the page for page quality… that can not be stopped
Thank you so much for your reply.
So I actually need to set up a separate directory on my domain for the PPC squeeze pages as in my domain/PPC/squeeze page for keyword phrase etc. and then use that in my destination URLs?
Do I actually put the sitemap link in the source code?(I don’t have a site map. Well, it’s basically a 1 page squeeze page site with the usual privacy and disclaimer pages.)
Cheers,
Tamar
PS I’m not terribly techie
The key phrase is “link popularity”

If I have the same article exactly as 25 other sites, but my permalink for that article has lots and lots more inlinks, I win!!!
Links people! Links!
AL
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You might be right but I would have thought google would have to take into account who posted first
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Great post . Thank you very much. Maybe this can make my blog more unique
Pretty much what I have been preaching all along! As long as you are providing good content you don’t need to worry about duplicate penalties. Even submitting articles to multiple sites isn’t something to worry about.
And link popularity is key!
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Thanks for the post Cow.
I have heard before that part of Google determining which duplicate gets listed is link authority, but I assume it could be other factors as well, such as the date of indexing, age of domain etc..
But, the duplicate penalty myth puts my mind at ease a little.
-Shaun
That is good to know. I don’t have any duplicate content any where and don’t really plan to have any.
Thanks Cow.
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I’m approaching a section about writing content on my beginners blog and want to know whether how the big G determinds who’s content came first and therefore who has duplicated the content.
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Aaaaaaaah yeah, I love it. Yo Cow, that was some goodness on the robots.txt file and your ppc pages, I’ll have to keep that one in mind.
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wow thats interesting, what i find strange is that if there are five sites with the same content then they obviously rank them on authority (hence the amazon.com example), which is a problem if another site with higher authority duplicates your content then outranks you.
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[...] Google Demystifies Duplicate Content – Kind a Sorta A was posted by John Cow earlier this week as well. You’ll really need to head on over to Google’s blog to read the actual post Demystifying the “duplicate content penalty,” as written by the Google webmasters themselves. It’s a little techy for me, but you’ll get the main points within the first few paragraphs. Thanks, Google, for the clarification. [...]
I have found something like that too. If you are more authorative than the original then you can outrank it.
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Duplicate content is fine as long as it adds value to the current content. It should supplement the main topic in a diverse style.