Search Engine Optimization
Based in the Ottawa area, we help our clients with their computer and Internet needs. Our specialty is modifying our client's website content to ensure that search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing give it a high ranking. In addition, we offer assistance in the design of web stores to simplify the shopping experience and enhance revenue.
While search engine optimization (SEO) is our specialty our clients often have other computer related needs. Our expertise allows us to help our clients in a variety of ways. We also offer webmaster services, computer network services, data recovery and other computer services.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Duplicate Content: Is there a penalty?
Since the algorithms the search engines use are not public it is hard to provide a good answer. Generally, my advice is to avoid duplicate content. Specifically, if you are quoting a source then it is proper etiquette to quote only what you need and provide a link as a reference to the content being quoted.
While there is no "penalty" associated with duplicated content there are issues associated with relevance. Here are a few simple rules to keep in mind.
Alternatively, there are a variety of perfectly legitimate situations in which you may have duplicated your own content and provided it to different URLs. Fortunately, Google provides guidelines regarding how their search engine works along with a few suggestions for how to structure duplicate content.
While there is no "penalty" associated with duplicated content there are issues associated with relevance. Here are a few simple rules to keep in mind.
#1. There is no penalty to your site for duplicate content. That said, if Google detects duplicate content on a set of pages it will try to provide only one result relevant to that content. The rational being that Google wants to provide variety in the results.
#2. The webrobot used by Google to read your pages avoids pages with duplicate content. If the page with duplicate content does not receive regular updates it may take a very long time for Google to read the page. Using rel="canonical", a webmaster can tell the Google webrobot that the relevance for the page's content and links should be directed to another URL.
All that said, if you don't need to have duplicate content the simple solution is to avoid it.
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