Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
When does it start to drag a site off of the SERP's ?
WMT is reporting as having dupe titles and descriptions. Are dupe titles a more serious problem than descriptions?this is not related to content at all. Google is teling you there is a problem here and all the titles and description are the same. Title and descriptions tell the bot what the page is about in very short sentence. If all titles are the same it is telling the bot all the content is the same, then yes you got a serious problem.
Most of the time this leads to the pages being put in supplemental or deindexed and you won't get squat for searches from all the content on the pages. Titles and descriptions have to tell the bot what the page content is related to.
Whitey
Really nobody can tell you the answer on the % of content that will get a site hit by a filter. This is a subject that is different for ecommerce sites as it is for informational site.
Ecommerce sites is a different world as there may be 1000 sites using the same product description on the net with 1000's of pages pretty much the same. Kind of hard to name a widget different 1000 times, so you question is a tough one to answer.
Best possible answer is if you have only 5% why not take the time and make them different then you have 0% and can rest assured your ok.
Are you talking about duplicate content within one domain - or content that is duplicated on another domain?
I guess i was thinking both, plus including meta titles and descriptions in that basket.
There's no fixed percentage - but they will take into account the whole page - so a page with 44 links, a few promo sentences, and other stuff common to every page - and just a para or two of 'unique' content, may be in Big Trouble.
Everything on Google is mathematical and there has to be a "tipping point" [en.wikipedia.org] - "the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable."
We know that if you have sitewide duplication though canonical problems a site will disappear from the results. Maybe this is because the duplicated pages could/may be scored at minus levels [ or at least zero ], sucking the entire site backwards, and out of the results. This type of thing is black and white where 100% of the site is affected.
But what about those "occassional" duplicate meta tags and titles in WMT that you may be looking at which have slipped under your radar?
What about the occassional interlinking between same content on different domains?
What about the %'s of snippet content between same site URL's or from other domains to help you build content, albeit not unique.
Complex probably. So let's break it down. What about if everything else on your site was perfect except meta descriptions and meta titles. What % of this would you consider critical to this tipping point ?
[Sorry Tedster ] - our posts overlapped
[edited by: Whitey at 11:02 pm (utc) on Aug. 7, 2008]
I'm wondering if Google has deployed another database partition (similar to the Supplemental Index)
or several ?
Complex probably. So let's break it down. What about if everything else on your site was perfect except meta descriptions and meta titles. What % of this would you consider critical to this tipping point ?
I don't think the 'tipping point' exists in isolation, though I totally agree there'll be a mathematical formula in there somewhere.
We know the 'amount of duplicated content' matters; this is probably a proportion of the code, rather than a fixed amount.
But Google may also recognise 'blocks' of duplicated content, rather than considering one total value.
Google may vary the requirement with the total page size.
Google may take duplicate content more seriously if the <title> is also duplicated.
Google may be more concerned about duplication if duplicated links are involved.
And there are many other relevant factors that 'may' be involved.
I very much doubt it's a simple % - and if it was, we'd have had serious estimates to argue about by now!
[edited by: Quadrille at 11:51 pm (utc) on Aug. 7, 2008]
