Can /? external links be used to assassinate sites?

...and trigger duplicate content nuke effect?

[fusioneer]

Well aware that third parties are not supposed to be able to effect ranking, but can linking to a (competitors) site with this format URL - [example.com...] - kill their ranking by triggering duplicate content nuke penalty?

Seeing a lot of issues similar to this in the forums, related to URL's of the following form:

[domain.com...]
[domain.com...]
[domain.com...]

Posts here:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

Note that it has no effect on PR whatsoever, purely on ranking; one of our sites dropped from #4 to outside the top 1000 with no other changes to site or content except Google picking up these URL's.

Experiments and comments welcome...

[Brett_Tabke]

Dupe content filter *always* trips on the duplicate (which is always the 2nd page found). Google is flawless at this as far as I know (I've never heard of a mistake yet). Given that, I don't see how a site could hurt you at all with dupe content.

Moral? Always link to your own site and url as much as possible within the page content. If stolen, atleast you get a link back ;-)

edit: clarified.

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 11:24 pm (utc) on Nov. 25, 2004]

[DerekH]

What is the "second" duplicate page?
Actually, I suspect you mean the first duplicate, or the second identical <smile>

But there's a serious question - how does Google determine which is what if the date modified of the original site is quite recent, due to a site upgrade, for example?

DerekH

[fusioneer]

Just to clarify - this is not about a site stealing content and thus tripping the dupe filter.

This is about a third party site, eg. a blog, linking to a site (multiple times with multiple strings) with the following URL format, or similar formats:

[domain.com...]

Reading other posts in the forum, the effect seems to be the same; fairly instant nuke, sites dropping out of top 1000 results completely.

Given it's fairly easy to generate a large number of trash URL's in this format, it would be interesting to see if the effect can be "created" by linking to another site in this fashion...it would violate what we previously knew to be true about third parties "damaging" a site's ranking.

Would anyone like to volunteer a site for a stress test? We'll create a blog with 100 trash URL's as above and see what effect it has on the rankings.
If it has no effect in 2 months, fine, we can consider the theory disproven ;)

[Brett_Tabke]

ah ic - the confusing description line made me think you thought it was a dupe content problem.

Lets continue over here:

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[webmasterworld.com...]