Duplication Penality Across Several Domains

[leraptor]

How does it work exactly?

The first site with the original content will get no penality.
The second site with the same content will get a little penality
The third site with the same content will get more penality, etc.?

[CainIV]

Good question actually. Anyone else have some answers?

[g1smd]

Are you talking about when you own 3 domains and they all point at the same server, serving the exact same content with a "200 OK" at three different URLs (exact page duplication across URLs)?

OR

Are you talking about content that other sites syndicate and republish, with the page and site navigation at the other places all being different (non-exact page code across versions)?

.

Whatever, [webmasterworld.com...] still spplies.

[CainIV]

I believe he is referring to three different sites all serving up the same information from one url on each site.

[g1smd]

Yes, but are we talking about "exact copy" byte-for-byte, or "syndicated" with slightly different page code?

[Edited Typo]

[edited by: g1smd at 10:13 am (utc) on Sep. 1, 2006]

[Quadrille]

First, don't use the term penalty; that is reserved for site-wide effects. Duplicate pages are either listed, or not, or listed as supplemental results; it has no effect on any other page in the sites concerned.

If Google finds identical or very similar pages, one will likely be indexed, the others probably as supplemental results, some maybe not at all.

There is no visible logic that predicts which one will get indexed; it may be the oldest, the newest, the one with the highest GPR. Or the lowest. It's probably a matter of which direction the spider was moving when it hit. Who knows.

People frequently point out that many duplicates ARE listed - yes, that's true. One reason is time - a new page from an OK site will get listed, but over a few cycles of spidering, if it's a dupe, it may get dropped (in support of this, news searches tend to have trillions of dupes as a story spreads around the world; they don't all last).

Another key factor is that Google looks at code, not the visible page - so a clone page has a very high chance of being dropped or supplementalized (dread word). But a page with very similar visible content, but very different navigation etc, may get away with it.

Also, of course, template pages with small content are at greater risk as the unique:shared content ration is bad.

Finally, other factors like meta tags increasingly matter in the duplicate decisions.

[edited by: Quadrille at 10:05 am (utc) on Sep. 1, 2006]

[Alex70]

Quadrille
>>Another key factor is that Google looks at code<<

Are you sure about this? To me it looks like googlebot view pages as lynx does. Maybe I have missed something...

[edited by: Alex70 at 10:44 am (utc) on Sep. 1, 2006]

[Alex70]

>>Another key factor is that Google looks at code, not the visible page<
Is this possible? Would you share your opinion?

[Quadrille]

Google sees the whole page; it may choose to ignore flash, js, etc., but it sees it all, and where duplication is concerned, that makes a huge difference. All it cannot see, of course, is images.