Duplicate content is a common occurrence on the web and in many cases can hurt search engine rankings. While the search engines may not always technically penalize webmasters for duplicate content, there are still a lot of ways it can hurt.
WebProNews is covering the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East in New York, where representatives from the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) discussed how their respective web properties handle duplicate content issues. Following are some takeaways from each.
Google has added a new way for webmasters to tell it which parameters in URLS, they wish to be ignored. They have added a new feature to Google Webmaster Tools called simply, "Parameter Handling." Google provides the following explanation with the feature:
While Google's Matt Cutts has certainly provided a wealth of helpful tips via the company's Webmaster Central YouTube channel, he is not the only one to do so.
If you're responsible for a handful of blogs or sites, and have been wearing holes in a thesaurus to avoid using the same phrase twice, rest easy. At SMX Advanced, Matt Cutts said some things about duplicate content that should comfort the average blogger or small business owner.
The SMX Confernece was in Sydney Australia last week, and one topic discussed by representatives of both Google and Yahoo was that of duplicate content filtering across international domains. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz notes that while the subject has been discussed in the past, many people including experts in the field have been in the dark.
Knol is a service from Google that lets people write "authoritative articles about specific topics." Recently, the 100,000th "knol" was published since the service's launch in July.
The issue of duplicate content is something that all webmasters and site owners have to take into consideration and the PubCon session "Getting Rid of Duplicate Content Once and For All," addresses that challenge.(Coverage of PubCon continues at WebProNews Videos. Stay with WebProNews for continued coverage from the event this week.)
If concerns about duplicate content have got you up at night, Google wants you to return to bed and get some sleep. The search giant (re)addressed the issue this morning, and the average honest webmaster has little to worry about.
One webmaster found Google unwilling to index pictures located in an images directory, but some extra content apparently left the site afoul of Google's guidelines.
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