Forum Moderators: open
What is duplicate content and what is the penalty
(1)"XYZ is the best offer for you", whether this on each page will be considered as duplicate content. How big sentence can be duplicated?
(2) Sometimes two sites offer the same stuff, and some laws are common to both of them, like
gov law section 3 says "you should not.........(100 words)",
This cannt be changed as this is a law, so whether this will be considered as a duplicate content.
In short
1) How can I decide whether it is a duplicate content?
2)What is the penalty for it?
Thanks
Aji
I am in big confusion, as I donot want to get penalized for anything. I kept some of the texts common as that looks good. I will remove it if there is a risk.
Experts help required.
Regards and expecting a good respose.
Thanks
Aji
As one of the sites I control is in the financial services sector we have on the bottom of every single page the same small print.
This small print runs into several hundred words - and some of the pages that contain this small print have very little difference between them in the rest of the page content and they all seem to rank OK.
This of course is within one site - as far as duplicate content is concerned on multiple sites I am not so sure and would also be interested to know what other people think.
IMO, Google can not push the duplicate content penalty up to high as they will be punishing lots of sites purely due to design factors and other factors (such as the above compulsorary(sp?) small print example)
By Design Factors for example, if you take a Framed Site and each Frameset has the same text - "Your browser does not support frames.....etc" - The only thing that is likely to differ that the SE can rank the page on may be the title (even then some people dont change titles!).
Therefore - people please correct me if I am wrong - IMO Google will return the page that is most relevant to the search result - this will include querying pages that have almost identical content - if you have the best match you will come out top of pages with duplicate content - if you have second best match you will not appear at all as Google will consider your page to close to the page already returned - but your page is still ranked and indexed by Google, just not returned on this particular search query.
Rambled a bit at the end here! :)
I think this topic is not that bad to discuss and this question comes into my mind quite often.
As I am not very old in this realm, I expect more expertise views. Dayo_UK, thanks for your views, even I feel its very tough to decide whether the content is duplicate or not.
Say for example, I am explaining Newton theories, I will repeat the Newton's theorems on my page. But my explaination can be unique and quite useful for the users. Some of the theorems may be quite big(300 words). I suppose atleast 100 sites will have the same wordings, will google consider that to be a duplicate content.
Expecting a good response.
Thanks
Aji
Any idea why people are not giving any comments. Have I posted my query in a wrong section?
Atleast give a link of a thread , I tried to read one but yet havent got my answers.
Anyway thanks
Aji
I have one page on my site where the toolbar shows up grey, and that one page is nearly identical to another page, so I assume that's why the one page has a grey toolbar.
But it's only the one page that's penalized. Google still likes the other forty or so pages on the site.
(I wonder if experts here could tell me if Google will un-grey the toolbar if I make the pages different, or should I throw out that page and get a page with a different url?)
ALSO, the pages have to be very identical to be penalized like this. It's very common for websites to have all pages based on a template, so if Google threw out pages for, say 25% duplicate content, half the web might be thrown out. So having some of the same text on every page of the site poses no problems.
Also, it's impossible for Google to check all 3 billion pages against each other for duplicates, so common sense says that Google can only figure out duplicate pages if they are linked to each other, or maybe separated by one or two links. Maybe Google could also check for duplicate pages that show next to each other in search results for popular keywords?
Also, it's impossible for Google to check all 3 billion pages against each other for duplicates, so common sense says that Google can only figure out duplicate pages if they are linked to each other, or maybe separated by one or two links.
Sorry Small_Website_Guy, I will like to have a different thought here. See when I can see whether a sentence is duplicated or not, by just searching for that string, why google cant?
But I do agree with you that penalizing will be tougher, as then my site is never safe, as someone else(say my competitor) can copy my whole webpage to penalize me. Anyway noone will do that, but surely i may put newtons theorem on my pages which are so common.
But google's algo is a great one, you never know whether your page will get a penalty or your whole site.
Anyway I think we must live with some unsolved problems and unanswered questions.
Regards
Aji
