Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Justin
[edited by: FlexAjaxSEO at 11:52 pm (utc) on Oct. 22, 2007]
Does being found out to have duplicate content hurt PageRank more than keyword ranking?
Not quite sure what you mean by "hurt PageRank more than keyword ranking?"
I assume by "keyword ranking" you mean ranking in the serps for a specific query.
PageRank is Google's measure of linking reputation. There's no one-to-one relationship between PageRank and ranking in the serps. Things like relevance and some 200 other fabled factors enter into it.
When you have duplicate content, ie onpage content that appears under more than one url, you often end up splitting your link vote. When Google sees the content as duplicate, there is no "penalty" as such. Generally, the version of the page with the most PageRank wins, and Google filters the other pages from the serps as duplicates. This is an oversimplification, but that's approximately how it works.
So, if you've gotten links to several urls, you're wasting the link love that's gone to the version(s) of the page that's not showing. You're better off simply sending all your inbounds to the same domain. Even if Google displayed all of the dupe pages, which they won't... would you rather have three different spots on page five, or one on page one?
The keywords in the domain name itself are inconsequential in terms of ranking one domain or the other. Without splitting hairs, the major ranking effect of the keywords in a domain comes from the inbound anchor text they attract. If you control the inbound links, just vary your anchor text. The intermediary of a domain (especially one that's not showing in the serps) doesn't really matter.
As for the meta description, it affects what shows in your snippets. Though there's some discussion that a unique description on each page will reduce duplication problems on large templated sites, the description basically has got nothing to do with ranking.
