Google Duplicate Content and Subdomain Issues
Duplicate Content Penalties
I captured the screen shot below because there is a lot of fuss in the SEO community about duplicate content penalties. Essentially, some believe that if a site has multiple URLs pointing to the same page that there will be a penalty placed on the site that prevents the page from ranking well.
I just did a search on Google to check the stock price of MSFT. I still have a few shares, it's getting close to 30, is it going back to the low twenties...Then bam! I know, it's hard to contain yourself, but what did I see but three very similar pages from Google all pointing to the same page.
Here are the three URLs that are all on the first pages of the SERPs
- finance.google.com/finance?q=MSFT
- finance.google.com/finance?q=msft
- www.google.com/finance?q=MSFT
The first two URLs are the same accept for the case of MSFT vs msft. The third URL points to the same content, but doesn't have the subdomain of finance.
Webmasterworld has a long post on this called Duplicate Content - Get it Right or Perish.
The interesting thing is Google doesn't do any redirects. At a quick glance it looks like most of their sites can be accessed with out the subdomain.
Just to make sure this isn't a one off of Google Finance, I tried another site, and sure enough it has the same subdomain vs no subdomain issue.
In summary, I guess google doesn't worry about these type of things. Or, does it play by a different set of rules?
Three URLs to the same page from Google on the First Page
thanx for this information.i was looking for such a kind of thing since long time.thanx.
Well, at any rate this was helpful Paul. Thank you!
Google has stated that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, they call it a myth. They made a youTube video on it. I will admit that it, the video, was made after this hub was created.
Thanks for the information. Great hub. :)
Thanks for your research on the topic. But I'm still not shure which role duplicate content plays for an ordinary site using subdomains. Google may not be concerned about themselves. But what does it mean to publish duplicate content on a subdomain for the the main site???
Very helpful article.
I have just read a suggestion that having a featured post slider in a wordpress blog or any such site can count as duplicate content, because it duplicates your own post of course.
@VizFact - Google is currently being sued by a subsidiary of Microsoft who claim that they are being unfairly ranked. The Google defence is? That the site in question has a 72% duplicate content ratio and that they clearly state sites with less duplicate content will rank higher.
I joined a Google seminar a couple of weeks ago an one expert said that there is no real penality for dc exept you are copying a whole website. so take that into consideration.
Hi, I'd very much want to use a subdomain. Thw question bothering my mind is that I don't know how to prevent the content of the subdomain from appearing in the main domain. That is inadvertently, the content shows up as domain. com/subdomain. Any Ideas?
Spin Ready Articles 3 years ago
Duplicate content is more of an issue when lots of exactly same content is found on the same domain. But I also think one should do all they can to avoid same content on other sites as well. For example, when submitting articles to the hundreds of article directories, I always recommend spinning the articles into multiple versions then submitting the different versions to the hundreds of article directories, instead of just submitting one version to all the directories. But remember - spin YOUR articles and not articles by other people that you don't have permission to use.