Yet more duplicate content fuzz
Read this post from Google on duplicate content, then read (and pay more attention to) Graywolf’s post.
I was going to blog about this whole thing, but Graywolf has summarized it well.
All I’d add is that Google are playing a dangerous game by pretending that they can handle duplicate content. What Google are effectively saying here is that people with good intent don’t need to worry about duplication, because Google’s algorithm can handle it. Maybe on a macro scale it can, but on a per-website level, and for the average webmaster, it really can’t.
I don’t buy their line that duplicate content penalties are a “myth” (as I’ve seen a direct 3 month duplicate content penalty on a large site), but I do think that there are filters applied that can effectively kill a website’s ranking for competitive terms, which can amount to the same thing.
Although
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
That point is largely ignored for the rest of the post. But it is the most important point - the best way to avoid duplicate penalties, filters, whatever you want to call it, is to create a good information architecture from the outset. This doesn’t just help the search engines (even if Google appear to down play it in this post), it helps your users.
