‘What does Google have to say about duplicate content?’ – Liebner’s Latest Article

Mike Liebner’s latest article titled “What does Google have to say about duplicate content?” is reprinted here. [Article]

Mike Liebner’s latest article is reprinted here.

What does Google have to say about duplicate content?

Happy New Year! Wow! It’s 2007!

OK, so I have been doing a good amount of research recently on Google and Duplicate Content.

It appears that they finally have addressed the issue publicly and their policies have been quietly unveiled.

If you would like to read more and get in on the conversation, please visit the AU Members Private Forum and discuss it with us! We’d love to hear what you think!

So far I just created 3 posts on this topic.

1. My conclusion about how “boilerplate repetition” as Google puts it, may be the reason some of my pages have been delegated to “supplemental status”. Uh oh! Templates and blocks of text repeated throughout a site may be hurting us! Are you using disclaimers or privacy policies in your template? Or maybe have repeating tips and or resources??? That may just trip an alarm!

Quote: “Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details.”

Wow… that made a light bulb go off…

From Google’s policy on DUPLICATE CONTENT

“boilerplate repetition”

OK, this could be a problem for us… Google appears to be cracking down on the use of ‘boilerplate repetition” and cookie cutter premade sites and templates in general – especially ones that have footprints… i.e. easily identifiable sections of code/text that may have been used by “abusers”.

So if they find a SPAMMER who had pages that they penalized and/or banned a site and they noted an identifier such as they can use that to find other spammers. That’s a footprint.

So if there is a template you have that other spammers have used it could be trouble for you… especially if there are many premade cookie cutter sites that have the same duplicate content.

“boilerplate repetition”

The above quote concerns me because I tend to employ a strategy on my pages, whether template, or original designed pages, that has a universal disclaimer…

What they are suggesting is that if you have a block of text that you use on your template that appears on many pages is that it could trigger a duplicate content penalty, such as relegating your page to supplemental result status…

Sooo…. that made me realize that many of my pages have BLOCKS OF TEXT on them that are repeated… that could very well be why some of my sites that use a common template across many pages have been supplemental…

The question is… if I do as they suggest and remove that BLOCK OF Text in my disclaimers or sidebar quotes for example, will that be enough to get the pages back to the normal index (not supplemental results) ???

Hmmm… food for thought…

Discuss this at:

http://www.mikeliebner.com/internet-marketing/ what-does-google-have-to-say-about-duplicate-content/

2. I found a video interview with a Google employee where she discusses what duplicate content is and whether it is a penalty or can make Google look upon your site negatively. She says no penalty. Decide for yourself.

Video link at my blog:

http://www.mikeliebner.com/

Vanessa Fox discusses sitemaps, PageRank and duplicate content. Google says they do not give a “penalty” for duplicate content… hmmm… ok… sure.

3. The actual blog post text where they discuss their filtering methods’ and reveal why and how they look at dupe content.

What does Google have to say about duplicate content? Here we have some insider talk about how Google looks at duplicate content. Keep in mind this is their public presentation and they surely have some secrets that are kept to themselves. But apparently a good number of webmasters have been concerned about this issue and have prompted them to make public a response.

*from the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog*

Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index

original link from 12/18/06 at:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ 2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html

Discuss it in the private members only forum:

Join AU at http://www.articleunderground.com

Discuss the official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index

I posted some excerpts at my blog in addition to the members forum.

www.MikeLiebner.com

Check it out. Non-Spam comments will happily be published on the blog, so get in on the discussion!

Best wishes for a safe and happy New Years Eve and a great year in 2007!

Happy New Years!

Mike Liebner

Mike Liebner’s Internet Marketing Blog has articles related to Web Publishing, SEO Traffic Tips, Advertising, Keyword Research, Search Engine Optimization and more! Liebner is also associated with Article Underground. Liebner can be contacted at mike@articleunderground.com.

*IMNewswatch would like to thank Mike Liebner for granting permission to reprint the latest article.