Google Duplicate Content and Subdomain Issues
71Duplicate 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.
Here's a Google Base example.
http://www.google.com/base/search?a_n0=hotels&a_y0=9&hl=en&gl=US
http://base.google.com/base/search?a_n0=hotels&a_y0=9&hl=en&gl=US
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
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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!
Spin Ready Articles says:
11 months 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.