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With all of the kerfuffle (love that word) over the sandbox, hilltop and such, what the ** does it mean when your site appears for a search when adding the 'filter=0' parameter?
This did signify dup content this time last year, I believe, is it still the same?
One of our clients' sites shows up for it's name (two words) only with that parameter added... But no dup content issues exist...
'filter=0' does seem to be producing some very odd results lately.
You're correct that it used to show duplicate content, and it still does to some extent. But it's now doing other things as well.
For a couple different searches I follow, adding 'filter=0' will drop the top-ranking page right to the sixth or seventh page of results. No duplicate content that I've been able to find for that page.
On the same searches, adding 'filter=0' lifts my site from the fourth or fifth page to the first. Again, no duplicate content that I'm aware of.
Apparently Google is applying a significantly different ranking algorithm for 'filter=0' results. (They look a little bit like the pre-12/16 results, but not exactly.)
On a practical level, this doesn't mean much because only a tiny portion of searches are done with 'filter=0'. But it may be able to tell us some things about what Google is now considering to be 'duplicate content'.
On the same searches, adding 'filter=0' lifts my site from the fourth or fifth page to the first. Again, no duplicate content that I'm aware of.
That's what I am seeing too. Some days the site is on the first page, but regardless of where the site is sans-filter (up to the third page, lately), the filter brings it up to #3 and then, as cabbie says, shows about 8-10 results for that site.
Maybe it considers that the site is "spamming" the phrase that with the filter set to 0 dominates the results; however in this case it's the companies name, so I doubt that's the issue.
Thanks tho, I just wanted to get on track with what this meant these days...
