Duplicate content penalty?!?!

[calebtheredwood]

I host my website on 'freewebs.com' with a domain name and I pay for their hosting package. I've been using them for three or four years now.

I recently started adding-on quite a bit of new pages and sections to my website. Google has always loved my site and indexed new pages within one or two days. Yahoo has not been nearly as nice.

My problem-question comes from a search on Yahoo for a recently added section of my site. For example: when I search for widgets I get results on yahoo for http://www.freewebs.com/widgets.html instead of the real http://www.widgets.com/ domain I've used for several years.

Is this a problem? Does Yahoo not rate me well for keywords because they think I have duplicate content? Can I some how not let them index or crawl the freewebs.com version(I have no control over the freewebs.com version)?

I get this http://www.freewebs.com/wolfpackpaintballteam.com/directory/directory-index.html
Instead of this http://www.wolfpackpaintballteam.com/directory/directory-index.html
When I do a Yahoo search for certain keywords I go for.

Any suggestions? Thanx in advance!

Caleb

[optimaliseer]

Hi,
When I use this line: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wolfpackpaintballteam.co m&bwm=i&bwms=p&bwmf=u&fr=sfp&fr2=seo-rd-se

I'll find 773 records at Yahoo, and a total of 1.552 (Google 17)
Look in your source, I'll advice to delete the "/" at the end of your meta.
Delete all spaces by keywords.
Check your keywords..... All words shold be found in your body content.

Suc6

[incrediblehelp]

Their is no duplicate content penalty. Google and other SE's will just rank one over another. That is it. It is a filter, not a penalty.

[optimaliseer]

The official gOOgle statement:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html

[calebtheredwood]

thanx for your replies!

could i just add a robots.txt to dis-allow them to crawl any of the freewebs version? or would i risk being removed from yahoo all together?

[incrediblehelp]

thanx for your replies!

could i just add a robots.txt to dis-allow them to crawl any of the freewebs version? or would i risk being removed from yahoo all together?

Not sure if the spiders will follow a robots.txt in a subfolder. Usually the spider follows the first robots.txt it sees in the root directory. Can you post it to review.

[Webnauts]

Not sure if the spiders will follow a robots.txt in a subfolder. Usually the spider follows the first robots.txt it sees in the root directory. Can you post it to review.
Spiders obey to robots.txt in subfolders, but only for the content (files) of the subfolders.

[incrediblehelp]

Yes but what if the freeweb has a robots txt in the home folder? The spider will listen to the instructions in the home directory first, then subfolder second, if it sees conflicting commands.

[optimaliseer]

The best thing to do is use a robots.txt at your top-level, because the convention between SE's.
Why do a lot of work, and you're not sure if it's working ?
Read : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt