Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals | Stacey Morgan Smith
My second session at SMXEast in New York, Duplicate Content Issues: The Search Engine Edition, was informative and included some breaking news.
The session was moderated by Danny Sullivan, the Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land, and the speakers represented Bing, Yahoo, and Google. Notes from each include:
Sasi Parthasarathy, Program Manager, Bing, Microsoft
You should expose only one URL per piece of content. Choose EITHER www or non-www and always use it. Canonical is a hint, NOT a direction. Don’t use duplicate content for juice manipulation. 301 permanent redirects are still your best friend. Remove links to expired pages.
Joachim Kupke, Senior Software Engineer, Google Inc.
There is no duplicate content penalty in Google. The only “penalty” is that similar pages are suppressed in search results. Use rel=canonical to tell Google which page to show. Two out of three times, Google would have shown a different page. A common mistake to avoid: designating 404 as canonical. Avoid chaining: URL A says URL B is is better, URL B says URL C is better, etc. A non-canonical page may still appear for a while in results if it’s in an obscure part of the index.
Cris Pierry, Senior Director, Search, Yahoo, Inc.
Make clean URLs. They perform better. Make them describe your page. Less is more in terms of length. Don’t have session IDs in URLs. Use a sitemap! Use Yahoo’s Site Explorer.
Q&A
Roboted URLs are indexed. They just aren’t crawled. Other sites may still link to a robots page.
Google studying cross-domain canonical. Within this year will honor rel=canonical across domains.
Google working on something to help ID a site as the original provider of content.
Majority of web content exists in more than one version.
Use your webmaster tools.
Google doesn’t necessarily give sitemaps a lot of credance. They don’t always use good XML.
Put your press release on your site first. THEN syndicate it out.
Yahoo and Bing don’t yet honor the canonical tag, but they should within the year.
The cross-domain canonical support and the announcement of “something” to help identify original content are both welcome announcements. Stay tuned for updates!
– Stacey Morgan Smith
