Blogs and Duplicate Content in Google

[Ms Naughty]

You're right of course, Walrus. In theory, sites that are good for users should rank well in Google.

There's actually a post in that webmaster world thread that says:
"Sigh. Here we are, building sites for Google rather than surfers."

[Halfdeck]

I know grandmascrotum is looking for a second opinion, so I should really keep my mouth shut, but here's my take anyway:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...e-content.html

Written by Adam Lasnik, a Googler - PR guy but IMO reliable. I would not trust what's posted about duplicate content on WMW.

During our crawling and when serving search results, we try hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has articles in "regular" and "printer" versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one version to list. In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments ... so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that'll befall webmasters is to see the "less desired" version of a page shown in our index.

Summary of his advice:

- block appropriately
- Use 301s
- Syndicate carefully
- Minimize boilerplate repetition. "For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details."
- Avoid publishing stubs (what I call "thin pages" - e.g. a blog category page with just one post)
- Understand your CMS. "Make sure you're familiar with how content is displayed on your Web site, particularly if it includes a blog, a forum, or related system that often shows the same content in multiple formats."

[walrus]

Originally Posted by grandmascrotum

You're right of course, Walrus. In theory, sites that are good for users should rank well in Google.

There's actually a post in that webmaster world thread that says:
"Sigh. Here we are, building sites for Google rather than surfers."

To be totally honest, I've given up on the thought of optimizing any of my blogs for the SE's and concentrated on trying to build blogs that I like and would visit.

If any of the SE gods like it fine, if not fuckem. I sleep at night and not dream of what the next change of the SE gods wind my bring.

[NobleSavage]

I use a varation of that:

<?php if( is_home() | is_single() | is_page() ){

if ( $paged < 2) { 

echo '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />';
} else {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';
}} else {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';
}?>

If it helps - I don't know.

[twn]

I wouldn't worry too much about duplicate content, i have a vbulletin board just like this board which has duplicate content virtually everywhere. From the archive to the single forum post view. When google couldn't detect good and bad duplicate content it would ban all vbulletin boards. But it seems it doesn't so google must be quite smart.

[walrus]

Here are a couple different articles on duplicate content proofing your WP blog.

I like this method (no plug-in) but this article links to a WP plug-in which others may like.

[Darrell]

I just use a robots.txt to tell the SE's not to index the category and archive pages so just the post pages get indexed. Seems to work fine for me.

[bDok]

Originally Posted by Darrell

I just use a robots.txt to tell the SE's not to index the category and archive pages so just the post pages get indexed. Seems to work fine for me.

On my splog networks this is what I did and it really helped to drive the amount of indexed pages through the roof.

Cheers,
B