Comments on: Duplicate content penalty: Myth or fact?

By: Aidan Beanland

Aidan Beanland — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:13:10 +0000

I’m not seeing the same results now: only one listing for dailydeals.com.au and nothing for catchoftheday.com.au on page 1. However, I do see allthedeals.com.au has 2 pages listed.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve had to re-educate on the ‘duplicate content penalty’ and explain there is no penalty, but there is a risk of de-duplication for certain query terms.

By: Dr. Pete

Dr. Pete — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 14:16:05 +0000

@James – That’s a good point. If there were some sort of amalgamation at work, the strongest domain would probably become the equivalent of the “home” page. It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out. Honestly, I hope Google slows down a bit. I worry too many of their changes in 2010 were reactions to Bing/Yahoo and not enough were really thought through.

By: James Duthie

James Duthie — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 02:31:41 +0000

Interesting thought Pete. My suspicion is that if they were treating it as the one domain, the Catch of the Day site would have to appear first, as its overall ranking signals are far stronger (aside from the domain name).
.-= James Duthie recently posted: Is Google’s duplicate content penalty an SEO fairy tale =-.

By: Dr. Pete

Dr. Pete — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:27:26 +0000

I agree – Google’s handling of cross-domain duplication seems shockingly inconsistent, and bigger brands seem to get away with more. I wonder if, now that Google allows one domain to have more than one result/page (without indentation), they’re treating this as one domain but allowing it anyway. They seem to be changing gears fast in that department.

Also, just an aside, but I’ve seen duplicate content within a site have huge implications for indexation and ranking. I think where we get caught up is the semantics of the word “penalty”. Onsite duplication isn’t going to cause a Capital-P penalty in Google’s use of the word, but the difference between a “penalty” and a “filter” feels pretty moot if you suddenly stop ranking.