Duplicate Content Explained at SEOmoz
Duplicate content. It’s one of those things in life that we all hate but can’t avoid…like taxes, buses and bathing (joking).
But what is duplicate content? How does Google handle duplicate content? And can you really be penalized for it?
These are all good questions, and thanks to Rand at SEOmoz, we know have a slightly clearer idea of how Google identifies and handles duplicate content. Rand also goes through some of the more questions about duplicate content.
My big takeaways from this article were that everyone has problems with duplicate content (thanks to scraper sites), and that the major search engines are fairly sophisticated when it comes to identifying content and duplicate content. For example, Rand says that the search engines can identify the actual “content” section of a page and keep that separate from the structural HTML and the static navigational elements on a page.
Outside of duplicate content issues caused by others stealing your content, many sites end up creating their own duplicate content issues by having multiple, indexable landing/content pages with duplicate content on them. This can be especially problematic for affiliates who create multiple landing pages with different images but similar content. Remember – the search engines aren’t looking at the images on your site, they are just “reading” your content. If you are using the same text on multiple pages you could be shooting yourself in the foot. If you are doing this, it is best to identify these pages with a “noindex, nofollow” or “noidex, follow” meta tag.
Make sure you check out Rand’s full post and enjoy his illustrations of GoogleBot by going here.
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