don'ts

[pne]

Wanted to do a quick summary of the mistakes I've made over the last few months relating to duplicate content.

Here's my hit list of things to avoid.

1. URL confusion. Mixture of yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com.

2. On internal links mixture of www.yourdomain.com/anypage and .../anypage.

3. When using session ids (e.g. for member login page) links can be generated with session id as suffix. This can, and has in my case, result in two copies of linked page in index.

4. Old, pre-launch copies of your site. In my case this is a site sitting on some free web space. No longer indexed by Yahoo!, Google still index it.

The problems in my view affext like this,

1. Duplicate content penalty.

2. Poor quality signal.

3. Duplicate content penalty.

4. Duplicate content penalty.

If you have all these issues as I have/had then you really need to get them sorted because you're going to be treated as a spammer.

BTW anyone got an answer for me on no. 4. I no longer have access to ftp or webspace for free hosted pages, so can't do a 301 redirect. Would love to get this old test copy out of Google's index?

pne

[hawkwind dave]

Hi PNE,
nope, I can't help you with number 4, is it that GG index's the old pages and ranks them above your newer ones? Or just that they're still showing?
If it's the former, then google needs to sort this out, especially with information sites. There's nothing worse than finding only out of date info, which ranks above more uptodate articles purely because it's older (maybe there should be a google archive, so if a page isn't updated in 6 months, it's bannished to the archive to make room for newer articles).
just a thought.

dave

[sfowler]

I still have the old free site up. Why not? I have just made sure that it has different content. Brings me a few visitors here and now.

Why should a mixture of relative and absolute links cause a problem?

[pne]

Hi Dave and Simon,

Firstly, my old free hosted site. I no longer have access to the webspace so can't change anything at all.

Secondly, I believe that Google does operate some obscure quality signal criteria.

Thirdly. My site ranks very poorly for my key words/terms. allinanchor:, allintitle: and allintext: rate me at no.2. I'm aware that these aren't particularly reliable, and if my site was ranked say 50-75 I'd just put it down to anchor text links and on-page optimisation. But it ranks 400+. Yahoo! and MSN Beta rank me very highly, so I don't think I've got any on-page problems.

In some ways, my initial post was a bit of a scream in the dark, in others a genuine attempt to rationalise what I was seeing. Any further input much appreciated.

pne

[sfowler]

How come you have no access to the free site? It can hardly be because you have not paid!

[pne]

Simon,

Good point and will work on it (some more).

pne