When you read blogs and forums about SEO, duplicate content is something that many often discuss. Some people claims that Google punishes duplicated content, others claims that Google does not punish it - they only favours the unique content on a website.
So, what is the big fuzz about? Why do we need to research on this phenomena?
The problem is that many websites - and e-commerce sites in particular has a lot of repeating content on their sites. A product catalogue tends to have very little information on each page. What we need to figure out through systematically testing is where is the point that triggers the duplicate content filter in Google.
In the initial experiment we will try to establish som common ground that we later can expand from.
The experiment will be carried out with the use of two sites. The reason for using two sites is to try to determine if Google looks at duplicate content only internally on a site, or if they also compare the texts from different sites.
Documents:
In the experiments directory of Labs.devenia.com you will find two directories referring to the experiment. Each directory contains four documents. Document 1, 2 and 3 will have unique text. Document 4 will contain the text from the three others. There is also a folder within the folder with another set of copies.
On bas.42g.net we have placed exact copies of the above directories with the documents.
How to measure the results:
To measure and study the results you open Google, Yahoo or Live and delete the letters 123 from the beginning of the word in the search box and hit search again.
Help needed!
To be able to see if the results can be reproduced, it would be great if you could copy the documents and publish the on your domain, so we get a bigger spread of sites to compare with. By doing so, we can also determine if the IP-range of the domains plays a part in this.
We need your feedback!
If there is any other experiments regarding duplicate content you would like that we conduct, please comment below with what you are wondering about. We will then try to figure out a way to conduct the experiments for everyone’s benefit.