How does google treat Duplicate content...

[mat_bastian]

I managed to end up with three copys of something I wrote for my site on three different websites. How bad is this really?

also, and really only remotely related, I changed my site structure and one of my pages was originaly at www.mydomain.com/widgets.html and I changed it to www.mydomain.com/pages/widgets.html. It got indexed at the first location and I wanted it in the second. Will this resolve itself or should I put one copy in each location or not use the second location?

I have some really nice content with a few PR7 links and I really don't want to screw up a good thing.

Any thoughts would be very appreciated.

[mat_bastian]

I apologize for being impatient, but with all the activity I am a little nervous that I am gonna do something to damage the site long term. Any opinions would really be great.

Thanks.

[PFOnline]

I know the mydomain.com/widgets.html move to mydomain.com/pages/widgets.html will eventually resolve on its own. But until it does, you may want to redirect the old page to the new location, or watch your 404 "not found" error logs.

This is what I would do anyways. I'm not exactly an expert on the subject, thats just my opinion, so you may want to wait for someone else to answer before taking my advice. :P

[mat_bastian]

thanks for the idea.

[emione]

I would highly suggest you put a noindex or googlebot noindex on two of the sites (pages). If what you wrote is very important to you on one site, let Google keep indexing that page. The other two you should stop Google from indexing them. Google could possibly catch this one-day and penalize the other two sites. I learned the hard way from an innocent and stupid mistake and got a site penalized because of this same situation. I hope they don’t catch your innocent mistake like they did mine. I’m still trying to get Google to understand that I’ve corrected everything, but trying to get them to directly fix something and reindex a site is like trying to get a direct line to the President.

[annej]

Aren't we getting a little paranoid here? A duplicate article is not a mirror site.

Anne

[mat_bastian]

that is a very good idea... should have thought of that. two of the sites aren't mine. So it looks like mine gets the no index. That's fine by me. One is in a post here, and if I could delete it, I would, but I seem to locked out of deleting it. Thanks alot folks.

[mat_bastian]

annej... that's what I was thinking, originally but yeah, my paranoia level is a bit high. But you know what? Just because your paranoid that they're following you, doesn't mean they aren't.;)

Is google able to tell the difference between a mirror site and a duplicate article?

[snowfox121]

If Google penalized of duplicate articles, there would be enormous numbers of sites suffering. Imagine the news stories, medical updates, research paper, etc etc that exist on multiple sites. Are we to imagine that each article can exist on only one site on the Internet or the sites will be punished? i don't buy it.

As i understand it, a penalty is for a duplicate site, not even a duplicate page.

Maybe someone can clear this up for us.

[annej]

I have several articles around the net that have been published on other people's sites. I also have the same articles on my own site. Some have been that way for years and I've never had any problems.

[vitaplease]

mat_bastian,

you might want to check this thread on duplicate content:

[webmasterworld.com...]

or do a site search by clicking the link on top of the page.

[chiyo]

I would be worried if the page was an exact copy. If there was at least 50% difference (diff menus, diff text formatting, diff links etc.), i wouldnt be worried. For example many many diff versions of the same Reuters story are on the net as the same time, as someone else pointed out. We give other people permission to copy up to 20% of our articles for example, as long as the page title tag is different and they link back to the original article. We would expect that the quote would be in context, eg. as part of a longer or realted article or on a list of abstracts of articles, i.e. put in context rather than just on a self standing page. That has not caused any problems so far. However we would be concerned if they copy the whole article, and are quick to ask people to take it off their servers if they have copied it illegally and not to our conditions.