Google Needs To Do More To Notify Webmasters About Duplicate Content
Month after month, year after year, duplicate content seems to be a HUGE issue. With no decent ways to detect it (that I know of), duplicate content can often go undetected causing problems for months. Almost every single client we take on has duplicate content issues, and often whilst they are client they make changes and cause more without us knowing.
Google needs to be more proactive about telling people when they have duplicate content on their site. Ok fair enough, it tells you if your title tags or meta descriptions are duplicated, but what about content? There are so many sites out there with duplicate content that don’t know about it, but if they did, they’d get it sorted. Google really needs to start reporting on this better – often people think they have been unfairly treated by Google, I’ve seen a couple in the last month or so – some of them have lead to Governments being lobbied.
If Google just made a simple change to Google Webmaster Tools to inform people of duplicate content, they would not only have less complaints, less people lobbying Governments etc. but it would also make their life easier, reducing the number of URL’s they have to crawl and helping them improve quality across the board quite easily.
So come on Google, sort it out, PLEASE!
12 Comments
Jim Seward - http://www.seward.org.uk
Agreed, that said, a lot of companies I’ve seen don’t seem that bothered. I had a fairly informal meeting with a major brand, a multinational electronics firm recently and I can’t believe have not been informed of these issues previously but the amount of canonical issues and dupe content issues I found on their site was incredible. Some of which could have been easily resolved with a canonical tag…simple fix!!
They even had issues of dodgy Google unreadable menu systems.
The people I was talking to said it was all handled in the States but I can’t believe that they hadn’t been informed of these issues previously, yet nothing had been done to resolve them
David Whitehouse
Yeah Jim, this is a common problem, particularly amongst large companies and household brand names.
Google really needs to make this happen – it’ll certainly improve the SERPs.
Alex Graves - http://www.footballinsight.org
Yeah Jim, this is a common problem, particularly amongst large companies and household brand names.
Google really needs to make this happen – it’ll certainly improve the SERPs.
Point proven
PaulH - http://assertica.co.uk
Would be abused and just as likely increase number of urls google have to crawl. Would give spammers a means of perfecting automated content generation without all guesswork and trial and error.
David Whitehouse
Paul,
I disagree, I think Google is so sophisticated that automating content isn’t really going to work. There isn’t any software out there at the moment that can do a good job.
Alex
Wouldn’t such a feature allow people to have their content SEO-checked (at least on the duplicate content part)? Write up (or copy/paste and alter) a text, check it against the “is it original enough”-tool and publish it. In other words, wouldn’t it defeat it’s purpose?
Oh and btw, more pages with more original content would mean more pages to index, or did I just misunderstand your last paragraph?
On the duplicate content of big companies: isn’t this caused a lot of times because they obtain the text from a database or catalog (books, products) from the producer?
David Whitehouse
Hey Alex,
I think Google is more sophisticated than most people think – they can detect duplicate content to a high level and I don’t think spammers would be much of an issue – if anything I think it would show them how ineffective their efforts are.
I think you misunderstood, I said crawl, not index: It would mean less pages to crawl, each duplicate page still needs to be crawled and then identified as duplicate content – if Google helped people remove their duplicated pages this would make their crawling process more efficient as there would be less pages to crawl.
Regarding duplicate content of big companies – this is usually down to site architecture, mind you I guess that depends who you work with.
Alex
Hi David,
Thank you for the quick follow up. I agree that Google can detect the duplicate content already to a great degree, what I meant was that if Google (in Webmaster tools f.e.) would allow webmasters to see what content they find to be duplicate (maybe even with link/proof to an original) wouldn’t that help the more grey part of the SEO world in simply use trial and error until they get it ‘right’?
But you make a remark of removing duplicate pages, so I think I misunderstood completely; you mean within your OWN domain (and not copied from a different website).
In that case I am all for! They enable me to see quickly where I made a mistake in a template or simply made exact meta/title errors, providing insight (and maybe even solutions) to page content would indeed be a great improvement.
Alex
David Whitehouse
Ah yeah, I see what you mean – although externally it is a problem too. We had a client copy there homepage text to their Facebook page, nightmare.
Batfan
Couldn’t agree more. Would love to see them implement this into Webmaster Tools.
Mullins Farms - http://mullinsfarms.com/
I agree. Esp if some scraper sites, rss sites, etc are getting credit for the articles…
rachael
Not strictly true that there isn’t a tool! CopyScape is a great way to check for duplicate content, has a ranking system as to how much of a html page is copied, and can look into more detail as to what it is on the page that is causing the problem.
Yeah – that said it would be great if google bought copyscape so we could all be lazier and use it in webmaster tools.
Really is useful tool though when a client is gets their content over to you. And when you ask them where they content was from and admit it was from their main competitors website because they were too lazy to do it themselves. You can tell them you already know.