Monday, June 09, 2008<\/p>\n
\n Since duplicate content is a hot topic among webmasters, we thought it might be a good time to \n Before diving in, I’d like to briefly touch on a concern webmasters often voice: in most cases a \n Generally, we can differentiate between two major scenarios for issues related to duplicate \n With the first scenario, you can take matters into your own hands to avoid Google indexing \n In the second scenario, you might have the case of someone scraping your content to put it on a \n In cases when you are syndicating your content but also want to make sure your site is identified \n Some webmasters have asked what could cause scraped content to rank higher than the original \n To conclude, I’d like to point out that in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does
\n address common questions we get asked regularly at conferences and on the
\n Google Webmaster Help Group<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n
\n webmaster has no influence on third parties that scrape and redistribute content without the
\n webmaster’s consent. We realize that this is not the fault of the affected webmaster, which in
\n turn means that identical content showing up on several sites in itself is not inherently regarded
\n as a violation of our
\n webmaster guidelines<\/a>.
\n This simply leads to further processes with the intent of determining the original source of the
\n content—something Google is quite good at, as in most cases the original content can be
\n correctly identified, resulting in no negative effects for the site that originated the content.\n<\/p>\n
\n content:\n<\/p>\n\n
\n appears in more than one place on your site\n <\/li>\n
\n often unintentionally) on different external sites\n <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\n duplicate content on your site. Check out Adam Lasnik’s post
\n Deftly dealing with duplicate content<\/a>
\n and Vanessa Fox’s
\n Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced<\/a>,
\n both of which give you some great tips on how to resolve duplicate content issues within your
\n site. Here’s one additional tip to help avoid content on your site being crawled as duplicate:
\n include the preferred version of your URLs in your Sitemap file. When encountering different pages
\n with the same content, this may help raise the likelihood of us serving the version you prefer.
\n Some additional information on duplicate content can also be found in our comprehensive
\n Help Center article<\/a>
\n discussing this topic.\n<\/p>\n
\n different site, often to try to monetize it. It’s also common for many web proxies to index parts
\n of sites which have been accessed through the proxy. When encountering such duplicate content on
\n different sites, we look at various signals to determine which site is the original one, which
\n usually works very well. This also means that you shouldn’t be very concerned about seeing
\n negative effects on your site’s presence on Google if you notice someone scraping your content.\n<\/p>\n
\n as the original source, it’s useful to ask your syndication partners to include a link back to
\n your original content. You can find some additional tips on dealing with syndicated content in a
\n recent post by Vanessa Fox,
\n Ranking as the original source for content you syndicate<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n
\n source. That should be a rare case, but if you do find yourself in this situation:\n<\/p>\n\n
\n blocked access to parts of your content in your robots.txt file.\n <\/li>\n
\n has been scraped.\n <\/li>\n
\n not have negative effects on your site’s presence in the Google index. It simply gets filtered
\n out. If you check out some of the tips mentioned in the resources above, you’ll basically learn
\n how to have greater control about what exactly we’re crawling and indexing and which versions are
\n more likely to appear in the index. Only when there are signals pointing to deliberate and
\n malicious intent, occurrences of duplicate content might be considered a violation of the
\n webmaster guidelines.\n<\/p>\n