Better handling of CMSs for duplicate content.

[Whitey]

Adam [ Lasnik ] mentions here:

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

Understand your CMS: Make sure you're familiar with how content is displayed on your Web site, particularly if it includes a blog, a forum, or related system that often shows the same content in multiple formats.

Although many may claim they do understand, I bet also, that many siteowners and webmasters get into trouble with this and it's potentially hard to track.

e.g. A simple rogue and mistaken URL like this one

http://www.example.co.uk/widget-one/Widget.html?&sb=Three&so=ASC

duplicating

http://www.example.co.uk/Widget.html

Would it be helpful for Google to show site owners through Webmastercentral the extent of duplicate content problems?

e.g. "Show me pages Google considers duplicate content"

[edited by: encyclo at 1:35 am (utc) on Sep. 15, 2007]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it will never be owned [/edit]

[whitenight]

Would it be helpful for Google to show site owners through Webmastercentral the extent of duplicate content problems?

This is a brilliant idea, but unfortunately Goog views all webmasters as trying to game them. So I think implementing this is unlikely.

I remember a thread a few months back saying the same thing to GoogGuy and Adam (lol must have been more than a few months past) in which he/they purposely avoided the question.

Think it was the "boilerplate repetition" thread.

[g1smd]

Analyse all the different "types" (formats) of URL that your software can produce.

You can use the meta robots noindex tag to deindex certain types. The robots.txt file can also be used to remove some types from the SERPs.

Be aware that which types you remove could have a large negative or positive impact on the listings for the site.

[Whitey]

I may be a bit late with this, but I've just become aware of this "Duplicate Content Summit" at Google :

Making a duplicate content report available for site owners

There was great support for the idea of a duplicate content report that would list pages within a site that search engines see as duplicate, as well as pages that are seen as duplicates of pages on other sites. In addition, we discussed the possibility of adding an alert system to this report so site owners could be notified via email or RSS of new duplication issues (particularly external duplication).

Working with blogging software and content management systems to address duplicate content issues

Some duplicate content issues within a site are due to how the software powering the site structures URLs. For instance, a blog may have the same content on the home page, a permalink page, a category page, and an archive page. We are definitely open to talking with software makers about the best way to provide easy solutions for content creators.

In addition to discussing potential solutions to duplicate content issues, the audience had a few questions.

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

There is then a follow up on this blog on September 12 written by Maile Ohye at Google : [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

Great stuff .... it's good to see that G understands the difficulties conveyed at the conference, but i think for most folks, the identification and management is not this straight forward.

A report would go a long way to help IMO

[edited by: Whitey at 1:10 am (utc) on Sep. 15, 2007]