Penalised for Duplication

[sardardolebole]

i have a website which i would like to know if it could be penalised for duplication of the index page or not in google. please message me and i will send the url. I really want someone to look at it and tell me if this is okay or not. thank you in advance.

[rfgdxm1]

Duplication of this page on another domain? What exactly do you mean?

[ciml]

Hello sardardolebole. We prefer to discuss the issues, rather than individual sites (between us of all here we'd have a lot of sites to review for each other).

In my opinion, Google handles duplicates very well. Usually the URLs are merged in the index, and the one with the best (highest PageRank) links remains.

[sardardolebole]

i mean duplication of my index page in the same website.

[aspdesigner]

Not a good idea. Google's duplicate page filter will likely remove all but one of them from the index. This can also result in a loss of PageRank.

For the same reason, always make all the inbound links to your site consistent, i.e., either all of them to -

www.mysite.com

or

mysite.com

but not some one way and some the other. Google considers these to be two different URLs, and will filter out one of them, and you can loose a lot of your PR in the process!

[ciml]

If you have your index page at two addresses (eg. "/" and "/index.html") then Google will normally combine those who addresses and just list the one that most people link to (usually "/"). If you're not lucky, the content has changed slightly between the times that the robot comes to visit. This can give you two URLs listed for the same page, but the PageRank is split between them and the rankings will not normally be as good.

Personally, I feel that people worry too much about duplicates.

<added>
But aspdesigner, if Google merges the records it also combines the backlinks and the PageRank.

[Phil_S]

I would stay away from any dup content.

If you want more traffic or want to test layouts for search engine ranking and customer conversions ratios, maybe try having to separate websites with completely different IP addresses.

We had 4 urls sharing the same website and Google did merged the urls into one, and created a big mess for us.

Didn't really mind the merge, but it was not the url we wanted to promote.

However, I don't think Google did picked the url with the most backlinks and the one in yahoo, it went with very first one we used.

PageRank and backlinks were combined. And was completely OK.

Thanks.

[vitaplease]

sardardolebole,

question is; why would you want this duplication?

[Phil_S]

One more thing about Google merging the urls into one.

You'll going to have a heck of a time getting them un-merged.

Think twice before you do any kind of dup content.

[aspdesigner]

ahh, ciml, but unlike "/" and "index.htm",

www.site.com

and

site.com

are not considered just two different pages, but two different DOMAINS.

Thus, having some links going to each variant looks the same to Google as duplicate sites hosted on different domains.

I would not count on Google always merging the PR in this case.

What can be worse, however, is if you do this inconsistent linking and the duplicate page filter does NOT catch it!

I know of people who have had this happen and suddenly discovered they had TWO listings in Google, but with the "link:" command splitting-up their links to each variant.

The result was that their PageRank got split between the two duplicates, and dropped down to about half of what it should have been!

Thus, they replaced one decent listing with two bad ones! NOT a good thing. ;)

[Phil_S]

One of my competitors has about 1,000 pages in their site, but somehow show about 5,000 pages in Google.

Somehow, the have the same exact pages in Google.

Something like this
[www3.theirpages.com...]
[www4.theirpages.com...]
[www5.theirpages.com...]
[www6.theirpages.com...]
[www7.theirpages.com...]

And so on.

They are a very big company and so far, it seems they have gotten away with this?

[ciml]

aspdesigner:
>ahh, ciml, but unlike "/" and "index.htm", www.site.com and site.com are not considered just two different pages, but two different DOMAINS

I don't see a difference. www.example.com and example.com can be merged, just as "/" and "index.htm" or www.example1.com and www.example2.com

When the whole domain is duplicated, it's not uncommon to see some of the pages on each.

aspdesigner:
> I would not count on Google always merging the PR in this case.

Quite. Google deals well with it normally, but why risk?

> What can be worse, however, is if you do this inconsistent linking and the duplicate page filter does NOT catch it!

Or worse still, you put up only slightly different 'doorway' pages designed to get multiple listings.

<added>
Phil_S, large companies often do things like that by mistake. Although it's annoying to have multiple listings in the results, they're probably doing themselves harm in terms of Google traffic for the reasons mentioned by aspdesigner.

[hurlimann]

aspdesigner I'm no so sure.

All links to our site are www.xyz.com but goggle lists xyz.com.

I think it must be because something with the host.

I think domains registered via them show the www.
Those that are not don't.

either way google seems to pass PR

[arjan]

i have got links to my site, both to "/" and index.html,
google merged alright

[Hardwood Guy]

Arjan:

I'm glad to hear that. I have two default(index) pages where one was created with an asp(host) mixup. It looks like I'm in the clear but still crossin' the fingers.