Google’s Advice For Cross-Domain Duplicate Content

Posted by Hersh Bhardwaj in Strategic web Marketing | Comments Off

It was inevitable that Google will have to clear their position on dupe content. They started by advising how to deal with duplicate content on your site without offending them. All fine. Here’s a little run down what that post means for you-

  • Find out how much duplicate content are you using within your site.
  • If you find multiple URL’s within your sitemap with similar content, volunteer and be willing to choose one over another. Smart huh, Google! But wait…
  • Use rel=canonical tag to tell Google which URL you’d prefer them to crawl, index and rank.

Rest of the post is about using 301 redirects and using Webmaster Tools URL parameter handling tool.

Now, this week Google came out to address the heart of the duplicate content issue- duplication across multiple domains. This is something most article marketers and grey-hatters are worried about. You can check the duplicate content cross-domain issue post yourself.

Reading and making sense of the whole thing, I reckon this will be helpful to both Google and genuine webmasters being penalized for dupe content unknowingly.

While this will help a lot of people, the canonical tag will mostly be debated by content marketers. Can Google convince article marketers to tag one source over the other?Well, this will surely make G’s task easy but what’s the advantage to those who distribute their articles to hundreds of directories? The non-tagged URL’s will not make it to SERP’s but will they pass on link juice? Will they themselves have ANY value at all?

This is one of the FAQ regarding this topic which Google played rather diplomatically-

“Q: I’m offering my content / product descriptions for syndication. Do my publishers need to use rel=”canonical”?
A: We leave this up to you and your publishers. If the content is similar enough, it might make sense to use rel=”canonical”, if both parties agree”