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Eek, not to rain the parade, but this is not good historious team. Google's duplicate content filter is generally accurate but in this case it penalized the sit
by mmaunder 16y ago
Eek, not to rain the parade, but this is not good historious team. Google's duplicate content filter is generally accurate but in this case it penalized the site that originated the content and ranked yours higher because it assumed you were the owner of the content i.e. the page about sending free SMS's.
Google will quickly correct this error and you'll find the traffic on that page drops to nothing. You may also find other duplicate pages on your site penalized in the same way. You may also find your site penalized by Google for essentially screen scraping sites and copying their content verbatim and in it's entirety.
I'd recommend you set up a robots.txt to block Google from indexing identical pages on your site. Copying content verbatim and republishing in it's entirety is not a good SEO strategy unless you have thousands of throw-away domains and wear a black hat.
Sorry about the negative message, I'm sure this was very exciting for you guys but I don't think it's sustainable.
Perhaps an alternative is to have your users highlight the paragraph or snippet on each page they found interesting and archive that instead. Then publish those snippets on your site. Generally I've found republishing paragraph size chunks of text is OK with Google and will net you decent SEO traffic. It worked for my job search engine when we republished job descriptions and limited them to the first 400 chars. You can also mash the paragraphs up into pages with multiple chunks of text that e.g. show all chunks of text a particular user found interesting or a set of users or by date or location. That will give you the best of both worlds - lots of content to SEO and no dup content penalty.
Best of luck!!
- JeremyChase 16y agoOr set the canonical address of your cached pages to the real page.
- StavrosK 16y agoDo you mean the "base" tag? We already do set that (admittedly, after this happened and because of it).
- fhars 16y agoNo, he meant the rel="canonical" links.
- StavrosK 16y agoOh, that sounds easy enough to do, we'll implement it right away (it should be live in a few minutes. Thanks for the tip, we didn't know about this duplicate content situation... EDIT: Added!
- patio11 16y agoThis does not work across domains, guys. (Among other reasons, it would turn injection attacks into $X million bugs for some companies.)
- StavrosK 16y agoThe google blog says it does...
- davecardwell 16y agohttp://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394 http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...
- StavrosK 16y agoThank you, added!
- JonM 16y agoI honestly didn't know this existed.... thanks!
- StavrosK 16y agoOuch, we didn't know that :/ Thank you, I'll block robots from the cache right away!
- StavrosK 16y agoFor the record, something I forgot to mention. All the ads load for the site of the cached page, and all the links lead to it. So, the only way the original site is impacted is that they don't have to bear the load of 50k visits on their site. Otherwise, they get all the ad revenue, signups, links, etc. Essentially, we're the only ones who don't gain anything from this.