Web Services, Duplicate Content, and Search Engine Rankings
My previous post on Google Ads and Penalization led me to this one. This post contains a question I hope to get some feedback on regarding Penalization of using Web Services.
How does a developer utilizing web services, specifically a Mashup developer, avoid getting penalized for duplicate content? Is this a real issue?
If severe penalization for duplicate content exists, this may effect those utilizing web services / APIs as data sources to create mashup sites. Especially using ecommerce web services and affiliate datafeeds, developers are contractually bound to use some exact content. The data provider is licensing the developer to utilize their content, however, my theory is that Google may see this as duplicate content. An example is an Amazon Associate using Amazon’s E-Commerce services to serve product, pricing, and review information.
This post from Search Engine Journal from Joe Duchesne back in July of 2005 reveals some interesting details:
“[…] Google is concerned about revolves around affiliate programs. It has been common practice for high traffic websites to establish an affiliate program. Affiliate programs themselves don’t worry Google. What it doesn’t like though, is for an affiliate program to take a template and then offer it to its base of affiliates to use. Some of the higher traffic websites end up with thousands upon thousands of duplicate websites all promoting the very same things and, according to Google, not offering any real value to the internet community. A website offering this type of cookie cutter website can easily find themselves de-listed by Google as happened to Template Monster a while back. […]”
So we know straightout affiliate, “cookie-cutter” type sites will suffer in Google. But my question is should this type of content be penalized, even if there is some original content in the mix? And is it already being penalized?
Another SEJ post, by Christoph Puetz, sheds some light into this area for us:
“On pages where duplicate content is being used, unique content should be added. I do not mean like just a few different words or a link/navigation menu. If you (the webmaster) can add 15% - 30% unique content to pages where you display duplicate content the overall ratio of duplicate content compared to the overall content of that page goes down. This will reduce the risk of having a page flagged as duplicate content.”
Ok, so add unique content. That might be a bit tricky for our site SecretPrices.com which consist of over a million dynamically generated pages! But we are definitely looking into ways to add unique content on portions of the site.
Christoph then goes on to say:
“Will this guarantee that your website stays in Google’s index? I don’t know.”
Great… So basically we’re back at square one!
Matt Cutts recently had a blog post about Notifying Webmasters of Penalties. I posted a comment, so I’ll see if he gets back to me on it. Eithier way the post is pretty informative, so I would suggest checking it out.
Personally, I’m not going to count on any great amount of organic Google traffic for any sites created based strongly on web services.
Here are some related readings:
- How To Avoid The Google Duplicate Content Filter, Search Engine Journal
- Duplicate Content can get You Banned, Search Engine Position
- New Duplicate Content Filter at Google, ThreadWatch
Related Entries:
Google would be right in saying that duplicate content over the web adds nothing to the community as illustrated in the blogging world (note my comments here) right now yet they seem to have no trouble with indexing sploggers, feeds repositories, or people that generally post the same content all over the place. The question is whether Google turns their head because most of those sites use Google’s advertising services, or if it’s just a matter of amount of content.
To me a service that draws in information from multiple resources dynamically and puts it together to form newly structured content is NOT duplicate content. If you are getting penalized for having descriptions as provided by shopping engines and the like perhaps you could come up with an innovative way of keeping google-bot from indexing certain parts while still indexing enough relevant info to keep hits coming from google when they should be. Google’s at fault here but I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Have you taken it up with them? They’ve been responsive to me in the past but I don’t know if that would hold true anymore.
Another thought hit me the other day when searching for the company homepage of the makers of software I can’t remember at the moment. There were a good 4-5 pages from all the incredibly crappy shareware/freeware software sites that each have the same exact content as the others, same wording in descriptions and everything.
Seems they’re not being penalized by Google. Again, this just adds more confusion. Are the software tracking sites not being penalized because they have layers of massive ads all over? Or is all this just false speculation and e-commerce sites aren’t beind penalized? It would seem to me like they are though since I never see them come up in Google searches. Perhaps it’s a Froogle competition thing. I guess it may be time to write a niche directory/search engine for Comparison Shopping sites and services without all the possible conflicts of interest. As for your own site you could start off with simple things like fixing your standards compliance since Google seems to like validating html/xhtml. Drop me a note if you need help with this.
Ja