Comments on: Google’s duplicate content filter is broken

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 23:53:48 +0000

Hi Patrick
You can use canonical tag this tell Google the original source of your post your posts get De-ranked because you changed your URL structure you have no link juice flowing to your new urls may that was a reason to get your post De-ranked if you had used redirection or canonical tag while changing your URL structure you had not faced De-ranking.

By: Patrick Altoft

Patrick Altoft — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 10:05:07 +0000

I’m not sure Sean. There are too many different possibilities to make a firm diagnosis.

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 10:00:25 +0000

Hi Patrick,
Let me know what you think of this:
I have a website that ranked for very good keywords and then one day, I messed up the robots.txt file. I forgot to leave an empty line after the last line (a Disallow: line). I read it somewhere that that’s equivalent to telling SE that they cannot crawl any of my pages. After making that mistake, around 3 weeks later, ranking dropped and traffic dropped by 80%! After I did some checking, I fixed the robots.txt file but the ranking still never return. Did further checking and found out that pages on my site has been classified as duplicates. I wrote those articles and now I have been slapped with the filter.

How I know I have been filtered? I took a few long sentences from my page and did a search on Google with quotes. My page don’t show up, I have to scroll to the last page and then click on “repeat the search with the omitted results included.” for my page to show up. That’s when I know I have been filtered. I have to go through the pages on my site to find those that have been filtered and rewrite them. After that, the ranking came back!

It’s really worrying seeing an authority site can get slapped and mistaken as the copy cat. I hope G only made that mistake because I mess up something on my site like the robots.txt file. In your case, you changed the url structure and I guess that made G confused.

Conclusion is, don’t mess up something important on your site. If you do, those copy cats will get your site penalized!

A lot of people say that Duplicate Content Penalty doesn’t exist but doesn’t this look like a penalty?

By: Patrick Altoft

Patrick Altoft — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:32:41 +0000

Some of the queries appear to be returning better results today, the duplicate content filter seems to jump around a bit.

By: master_rooter

master_rooter — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:33:11 +0000

I get frustrated too because a well know scrap site is ranking better than i do (me who produces the content but copied by someone else). What will Google (which is a quality content driven search engine) do? Nothing.

By: Sucker

Sucker — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:23:47 +0000

I did a lot of URL structure changes on one of my sites late in 2007 and had this same problem. A few pages were fixed with 301 redirects but Google is disregarding others (or devaluing them a little.)

By: Chetan

Chetan — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:55:35 +0000

Hope you dont go into a phase like John Chow is doing. Content scrap was one of the reason for getting penalised in google for him.
I actually just hate the content scraping sites, those who just copy each and every content of my blog and just linking back to my original post.
In my mind, these kinda sites hurt our quality by having all copied matter, and giving link back showing that we have low quality backlinks from unnatural pages.

By: Syam

Syam — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:42:42 +0000

I am no expert but I guess there are enough crawlers who keeps linking to popular articles from reddit,digg and sphinn .. effectively making those pages ranked best. I believe Google should figure out themselves the hub should not be considered as destination.