Duplicate Content NOT to be indexed

[ArthurNYC]

I own a large network of review sites and for the past 3 years we have done a dance with Google where all of a sudden they bump everything up to a $10 Min Bid and we are done. Over three years it has happened 3 times and every time we slightly change the URL (s, -, ...) and go back to work. The issue we have is that we never get natural listings.

Three months ago the site was redesigned by a top level SEO guy for us and we are getting natural listings all over the place. (If anyone needs a recommendation, PM me as he did a great job). But now we got whacked by Google again with a $10 min bid (please do not try to analyze the reason for this, even our reps only say it has something to do with the landing page, we have been on every forum, spoken with every rep at any partner company and we get no real clear answer).

So now the question is, how do I leave the OLD site live (the one that is getting natural listings) and do PPC on a new URL. There are hundreds, if not thousands of pages of Unique content but it is now duplicated and that will eventually catch up to us and hurt natural rankings.

How do I completely stop Google (and others) from seeing the PPC site and listing it in their search engines? If it never gets spidered, never gets listed, then I assume/hope the natural listing site will not be penalized for duplicate content.

Thanks in advance.

BigFish

[Webnauts]

Watch this interview with Adam Lasnik from Google, and if you still have question, post again:
Video: Interview with Adam Lasnik of Google

[thindenim]

That's a great interview. Some interesting comments on sculpting internal pagerank, food for thought...

[Webnauts]

That's a great interview. Some interesting comments on sculpting internal pagerank, food for thought...

I agree. Adam have confirmed my position about not implementing the nofollow attributes for internal pages like contact, etc.

[incrediblehelp]

Watch this interview with Adam Lasnik from Google, and if you still have question, post again:
Video: Interview with Adam Lasnik of Google

What does this have to do with his PPC dilemma?

Either way Arthur you could set up another domain and simply block the robots from accessing this domain and only focus on PPC here. I do not recommend this because you lose out a lot from a branding perspective trying to market two different domains. It is also very confusing to the end user. You could help build the brand of your "main" domain and just set up a sub domain for PPC reasons.

[Webnauts]

The question was: Duplicate Content NOT to be indexed?

[DoneInStyle]

Great video. Thanks for posting the link, Webnauts!

[incrediblehelp]

The question was: Duplicate Content NOT to be indexed?

Just saying a nofollow doesnt seem to fit right here.

[davidweb]

I own a large network of review sites and for the past 3 years we have done a dance with Google where all of a sudden they bump everything up to a $10 Min Bid and we are done. Over three years it has happened 3 times and every time we slightly change the URL (s, -, ...) and go back to work. The issue we have is that we never get natural listings.

Three months ago the site was redesigned by a top level SEO guy for us and we are getting natural listings all over the place. (If anyone needs a recommendation, PM me as he did a great job). But now we got whacked by Google again with a $10 min bid (please do not try to analyze the reason for this, even our reps only say it has something to do with the landing page, we have been on every forum, spoken with every rep at any partner company and we get no real clear answer).

So now the question is, how do I leave the OLD site live (the one that is getting natural listings) and do PPC on a new URL. There are hundreds, if not thousands of pages of Unique content but it is now duplicated and that will eventually catch up to us and hurt natural rankings.

How do I completely stop Google (and others) from seeing the PPC site and listing it in their search engines? If it never gets spidered, never gets listed, then I assume/hope the natural listing site will not be penalized for duplicate content.

Thanks in advance.

BigFish

Hi, Sorry, but it was bit difficult to perceive your exact problem. Please clarify whether you are facing issues with duplicate content or PPC bidding ??

As far as duplicate content is concerned, it is a serious issue. People on several blogs argue that duplicate content is just a filter and not penalty. Moreover they will justify that duplicate content only gets added into the supplement index.

However the real question is what will happen to all those pages linking to a particular page ( which has been perceived as duplicate by google). The fact is that all those links connected to duplicate page will loose their rankings, PR and will eventually die down.

It is best to avoid duplicate content filter in the first place. If google detects any then remove every instance of duplicate content from your website.

It will help you score higher rankings on both Google and Yahoo.

[JezC]

Duplicate Content in the same site is not a huge deal (ref, Matt Cutt's blog, earlier this year).

Duplicating content between sites *is* a big deal (same article by Matt) - because Google may prefer the "wrong" site, as much as any other reason. See Matts replies to comments to his article, about half way down the current list of responses.

However, I think SEO is a red herring for this. Looks like the crucial issue is the PPC problem.

Landing Page Quality Scores for AdWords are *usually* easy to resolve - the MinCPC primarily affects the initial value for the bid, and is only slightly related to the AvCPC (the paid CPC). So long as the advert gets a good CTR, the MinCPC will usually decline with time. This is how major brands end up with $0.02 MinCPC (No one *starts* with $0.02 MinCPC - you start with $0.05 or $0.10 or whatever, and work it down). Very often the cause of a high MinCPC is the way that the AdGroup was built, and the precise way that the landing page URL was determined by Google. Under some circumstances, altering the order of adding adverts and keywords can affect the MinCPC. Adverts with landing pages determined using DKI can be a particularly nasty problem to resolve. The nature of Google's auction *usually* means that a high MinCPC is not well correlated with the AvCPC - IOW, a $10.00 MinCPC may result in a $0.20 AvCPC because of the other participants in the auction.

From the brief outline of the problem, I'd:

1/ avoid duplicating content on another site (that site should be poorly ranked, eventually, even if you don't use robot exclusions or other techniques to prevent spidering) - mostly for reasons of brand experience and the internal costs of running/managing both sites.

2/ not worry too much about duplicating content within the site (unless you find that poorer pages are getting the rank, in which case focusing on sitemap issues, using nofollow, noindex and robots.txt can help). Google really does seem to know that customer-oriented reasons can result in internal duplication. However, putting all the link weight behind one page will probably help.

3/ work on resolving your problems with MinCPC and AvCPC by focusing on the way in which the AdGroup is constructed, and the CTR.

More information about the PPC problems might help better diagnosis.

Cheers, JeremyC.