Duplicate Content Penalty

A good number of webmasters and ecommerce marketers have been reporting a drop in traffic for the past month or so. What’s happened is Google has tightened or stengthened its filtering of duplicate content. Google considers duplicate content a problem because it generates poorer quality search results. You can see their point when the top ten results are gummed up with the same page from 2 or 3 sites. So, they’ve gone about dealing with this issue.

Google reiterates that it’s not a penalty unless they believe you’re doing it deliberately.

It’s not uncommon that businesses publish their web content to more than one domain. ecommerce sites especially often have a US, UK and Canadian version. The first pages is different but the backend shopping cart products and descriptions are generated from the same database. It seems perfectly logical to customize and personalize for those respective audiences. Regardless, Google wants to force web site owners to stick with one site.

ecommerce and large information site owners have found their sites losing traffic. The keyword tailing traffic is what has fallen off. Keyword tailings is a term used to describe the thousands of odd phrases that searchers use (e.g., digital cameras). Not the most popular phrases but ones that have lots of keywords in them (e.g., sony digital camera 100 x digital zoom). The dropoff in traffic really hurts small ecommerce sites that live on these unusual phrases and even big ecommerce sites that previously had huge traffic.

Google has a filtering method that clusters similar pages together. It counts the keywords in them ,along with title tags, text links, and headings to determine whether that content was redundant. It’s had this filtering for a long time, but only lately have they ramped it up. After the filter is run, the pagerank distribution in the site is changed and pages that once brought in traffic don’t rank as well. Their pagerank has been stripped. Google picks and chooses which pages will be shown in the results and often that is not the page you want to have ranking.

The benefit for Google is that companies who getting free organic traffic now may have to begin doing adwords advertising to gain visibility on those phrases again. That would be a huge boost in Adwords revenue if applied to hundreds of thousands of ecommerce sites.

To get over your duplicate content issue, you need to make your content unique in every respect. So the art of SEO copywriting is needed to make your content look unique to Google. And it is an automated algorithm that judges its uniquness and relevancy. It can be frustrating when Google really doesn’t tell you what factors are involved. They just spout the usual “Create unique, valuable content and everyone will enjoy your site”, advice, but their way of assessing content still isn’t compatible with how most content is devised and and written.

There are ways to maintain each of your domain’s rankings, but one thing for sure is that you’ll need to rewrite your content so it is unique and relevant at the same time. Not an easy task. The issue of managing a network of websites is suddenly not so easy anymore.

Read more on Google’s duplicate content issue. Google’s advice is not easy to implement.

One of the reasons I use wordpress blogs is due to wordpress’s handling of duplicate content issues which is a big problem with blog content categorization.

Contact me about content development and SEO.

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