Duplicate content penalties levied by Google against proxy sites are a topic of frequent discussion, both for SEO and SEM users. In my opinion, it is not a strong force significantly affecting most online advertising or small business Web sites.
The duplicate content penalty seems designed to prevent huge sites from clogging the useful results of other smaller pages with a large volume of database-generated pages. Those pages are (often deservedly) in a different category than most of the human-generated content that is useful to human searchers.
Many near-duplicates are screened out by search engines with a different mechanism. Google adds a note to the end of the results page saying, "In order to show you the most relevant results we have omitted some entries very similar to the XX already displayed."
This special feature is sensitive to the search term and seems meant to reduce the noise of numerous similar pages in the results without dinging their PageRank permanently. I have found it to do a good job of keeping the interesting results and filtering out only dry, truly duplicate and non-useful content.
I believe good content is the most critical element affecting both organic and search engine PPC page rankings. Your good content carries much more weight than limited, non-malicious, proxied duplicate content. And it helps your online advertising campaign. As a smart marketer, you can create unique content on your landing pages and product description pages that will boost your organic listings when prospects search on your targeted keywords. Good content is must for small business marketing online.
Google is well aware of the natural landscape of the Web. I think it is more interested in exposing the Web’s useful data and burying the less-useful data. In a judgment call between penalizing two small sites with instances of similar content, and penalizing a vast site’s thousands of pages of near-identical template content, I feel Google is likely to keep the smaller pages around and swipe the vast number of dull pages.
-- Contributed by Dan Lozano
The duplicate content penalty seems designed to prevent huge sites from clogging the useful results of other smaller pages with a large volume of database-generated pages. Those pages are (often deservedly) in a different category than most of the human-generated content that is useful to human searchers.Many near-duplicates are screened out by search engines with a different mechanism. Google adds a note to the end of the results page saying, "In order to show you the most relevant results we have omitted some entries very similar to the XX already displayed."
This special feature is sensitive to the search term and seems meant to reduce the noise of numerous similar pages in the results without dinging their PageRank permanently. I have found it to do a good job of keeping the interesting results and filtering out only dry, truly duplicate and non-useful content.
I believe good content is the most critical element affecting both organic and search engine PPC page rankings. Your good content carries much more weight than limited, non-malicious, proxied duplicate content. And it helps your online advertising campaign. As a smart marketer, you can create unique content on your landing pages and product description pages that will boost your organic listings when prospects search on your targeted keywords. Good content is must for small business marketing online.
Google is well aware of the natural landscape of the Web. I think it is more interested in exposing the Web’s useful data and burying the less-useful data. In a judgment call between penalizing two small sites with instances of similar content, and penalizing a vast site’s thousands of pages of near-identical template content, I feel Google is likely to keep the smaller pages around and swipe the vast number of dull pages.
-- Contributed by Dan Lozano
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