How best to treat blog preview snippets and duplicate content?

[smithaa02]

It's quite common to have a blogroll (summary of your blog articles with the first few sentences of your blog).

How does google treat this for duplicate content? So if your first sentence is "Red widgets are the best.". This is on your homepage and the actual article. They in essence compete with each other? What determines which google respects? Is there a good way to get google to recognize this relationship so both summary/preview pages can rank equitably along-side actual article pages?

[Kratos]

Google treats duplicate content like any other content. It indexes it and then it decides which to rank based upon the PR flow to the article. There's no duplicate penalty (that's a huge myth) so no need to worry about duplicate snippets on stuff like categories or on the sidebar (if that's what I understood from your post).

Google will recognize the relationship because the titles usually link to the article and Google follows the link. Also I thought a blogroll was a list of blogs you liked and which you listed on the sidebar, are you perhaps talking of the blog posts on the homepage (with snippets) instead of a static page? hat's why I was a bit confused with what you exactly mean, but if you're worried about duplicate content, then do not worry about it in terms of fearing a penalty. You do of course have to optimize the document you want to rank so try to use the canonical tag on the copies of the original document you want to rank.

[smithaa02]

Thanks for the reply. I am not worried about a penalty...more so the opportunity cost of not ranking for both the "story page" and the preview pages. I may have used my terminology incorrect in my initial question BTW.

So say I have a link titled "Red Widgets". It goes to an article with the title "Red Widgets". They both contain the sentance "Red widgets are the best.".

Which will rank higher (for that sentence) and why? Is google familiar with this type of snippet/preview structure and do they have means to giving you credit for both pages if you arrange this in an acceptable manner?

I mean if I have a page called "favorite widgets" which has snippets of my 10 favorite widgets (articles) and each links to its own article (like Red Widget), is it not possible to get credit for both?

This has to confuse google somewhat...

[Kratos]

Nah, Google can easily identify that the snippet belongs to an actual article. Bear in mind that Google actually is capable of recognizing your CMS and using rules of thumbs to index and navigate your content. They have guys studying CMS like Wordpress so that they can understand it better and index just about everything that can be useful to the internet and that you as a webmaster may unintentionally not make very easy to access. After all Google is all about indexing the whole of the net so it wants to get into your site (unless it's a spam site).

You can however rank the page full of snippets (for example a category page). I do that and I see that done by our competitors and in many other niches. However, such pages will usually rank for long tail keywords unless they have some very strong high PR external links pointed to the category page (and/or has very strong internal links). Sure the page if full of duplicated content from the snippets, but altogether the snippets create a one different document, a different page. And any page inside a site can rank.

For the sentence you mention your full article will rank higher as Google will have identified the snippet to belong to the full article and Google will understand the page where the snippet lies as a benign doorway page (category, tag, dynamic blog homepage). Take into account Google uses the hyperlink of the title as a strong signal that the text in the snippet does indeed belong to the full article and that there's more (useful) content in the full article.

[smithaa02]

What is odd, is that I've had cases where the "overview page" ranked higher for the duplicate sentence. And in some cases the story page ranked higher. It has been inconsistent and has me a little baffled.

[rish3]

What is odd, is that I've had cases where the "overview page" ranked higher for the duplicate sentence. And in some cases the story page ranked higher. It has been inconsistent and has me a little baffled.

Ahh, the difference between what we assume Google should be capable of, and what actually happens :)

[Planet13]

1) Go to your local grocery store

2) While waiting in line at the counter, take a photo of the magazine rack that is always right in front of you when you wait in line.

3) When you get back to the office, look at the photo, and analyze which headlines stick out to you the most and make you most want to read that story.

4) Re-write your snippets like those headlines.