Google’s face is normally Matt Cutts but now another guy is being let out to speak… Greg Grothaus.
And what a video to start with…the myth of duplicate content!
Greg starts with saying that Google DOESN’T penalize sites for having duplicate content but it can have a negative impact on your rankings.
Is that not being penalized?
He goes on to say that website owners THINK they are being penalized because their content is being omitted from Google’s results.
We’ve all seen the message:
“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 20 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”
Greg says the content may be being omitted just for that query.
“What’s actually happening, is that we’re looking at the query that the user’s doing, and we’re saying that we want diversity in the results we’re going to show a user,” says Grothaus.
He says those who think their content is being omitted because it is duplicate, will likely find that if they adjust their query to more specifically reflect the missing piece, they may just find that it shows up in results after all.
There are some duplicate content subjects and resolutions Greg covers in the video…you can see it here:
I am listening to the video now as I search. Sounds a bit political. But I try not to duplicate content on my site that I put elsewhere on the web.
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Gerlaine,
This is more to do with having duplicate content on your site not elsewhere on the web. Having duplicate content elsewhere on the web is a bit of a myth.
Andrew
We all know what Google do about duplicate content, but I will try and experiment what Greg Grothaus is said and see if the search result when you click on omitted result will be include.
I followed the video from beginning till the end, it was a quite long video, but very helpful.
For this reason, i love WordPress because with All in One seo pack plugin or perhaps others, we can set our canonical tag.
Thanks for sharing this helpful video, Andrew.
Google has really tightened up by introducing stricter set of rules specially emphasizing on quality content and quality link building practices and duplicate content is not far from these two. Duplicate content, however unique we try to make it still remains duplicate but we all have our own personal point of views.
I think having the user alter the query to include duplicates is a penalty of having duplicate content.
That’s one more click your visitors must do; therefore, traffic would be reduced. Maybe not completely but it does have an impact.