Google penalty for SEO Settings?

[papi34]

If you already had urls indexed in Google, does Google penalize your site for duplicate content after enabling shortlinks in MM5.5?

I've read that you need to do a 301 redirect on all the old urls to all the new urls to avoid this. Anyone care to comment?

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

N0!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. (and no, i am not yelling at you...just the thousands of tiny mumbles murmering, 'duplicate content, duplicate content, duplicate content....".

Duplicate content is the SAME content repeated on DIFFERENT URLs. Having the same content under the same domain is not considered duplicate content. (All the same, it don't help either.)

[papi34]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

N0!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. (and no, i am not yelling at you...just the thousands of tiny mumbles murmering, 'duplicate content, duplicate content, duplicate content....".

Duplicate content is the SAME content repeated on DIFFERENT URLs. Having the same content under the same domain is not considered duplicate content. (All the same, it don't help either.)

Good...Thx!
btw, I read it here.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

Yea, hence the shouting...lots of folks (seo types included) repeat this nonesense...

btw. i do recommend using 301 to the "seo links" but for efficiency reasons.

[jason - jmh web services]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

If you already had urls indexed in Google, does Google penalize your site for duplicate content after enabling shortlinks in MM5.5?

yep, it can and, that is a fact.

I've read that you need to do a 301 redirect on all the old urls to all the new urls to avoid this. Anyone care to comment?

that is a start. then you also need to ban google from the old directory as well.

[Barrett]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

If you are currently ranking well with your current urls, why mess with it ?

I would considering hiring someone like Jason for consultation and seo analysis on your specific case before implementing any changes.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

While many have stated the "duplicate url" penelty...I have never seen a certified instance of this penelty where the "duplicate" url is within the same domain.

[Pete McNamara]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

As I have said many times before, there appears to be no 'penalty' per se. But, in Google, duplicate pages from the same site end up in the supplemental index, as duplicates. If you agree with that statement then you do not yet fully appreciate the downside of it (despite me trying to explain it to you in a number of other threads).

As Jason said.

[PicturesqueWeb]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

It's a repeat for me as well. You can get a site listed well without short URLs. Just Google merchant.mvc. If they can get listed, so can you. Still I have customers that want me to create short URLs. I can't say as I have proof that the resulting duplicate URLs cause issues, but common sense seems to dictate that anything that makes Google's job harder isn't a good thing. If we do something that is going to make Google look stupid, Google isn't going to like us very much. If you don't want to mess with htaccess and 301, great. Focus on excellent content and ease of navigation instead. I believe the reward is greater and the time better spent.

[Biffy]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

Here's the proof.

Your category tree has links to all categories from all pages. Sometimes there are hundreds of copies of each link when there are hundreds of categories. This is not duplicate content, this is duplicate links. No penalty.

If duplicate links were a penalty, there would not be a single Miva website to be found in Google Search. They'd all be penalized totally out of the index. This is not what's actually observed.

The duplicate content penalty is for the same content on different domains. This is why we resolve all domain calls to the www version with htaccess. Google sees the www version and the non-www version of your domain as two separate domains.

Google implemented the duplicate content penalty with the Florida Update. It was done to penalize companies that posted the same website under hundreds and thousands of domain names in an attempt to flood the search results with their sites. The travel agency and florist industries were hammered by this penalty along with some others.

[Mark Hood]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

I think the supplemental index is gone
http://www.google.com/support/webmas...028&topic=8845

I like having short links just for the ease of linking to them for customers.

[Greg B]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

You can also read duplicate content on the google webmaster blog

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...-scrapers.html

[d_host]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

Your category tree has links to all categories from all pages. Sometimes there are hundreds of copies of each link when there are hundreds of categories. This is not duplicate content, this is duplicate links. No penalty.

There is one tiny itsy bitsy exception to this... If you have products assigned to multiple categories, the same "content" (PROD page) may be indexed as a separate page. So, if you have a product that is assigned to 10 different categories, you have "10 copies" of the same page being indexed - all with different URLs containing the &Category_Code=XXXX string, with 10 different variations of it. This unfortunately does look like duplicate content - the URLs are all different, but the resulting page has identical content to the other 9 copies.

We've had a few clients implement an option where every time you click on a product link, it strips the &Category_Code=XXXX from the URL, so that the resulting URL is always the same for the same product, no matter which category you get to it from. This fixes the duplicate content penalty, but does have one tiny side effect - it breaks the breadcrumb trails, if you use them.

I think it might be an idea for Miva Merchant to make this an option, or perhaps a default setting, to not use the &Category_Code=XXXX string in URLs, unless explicitly enabled for people who want to use breadcrumbs (or implement a different way of tracking visitors' paths altogether). This would prevent one product being considered "duplicate" simply by virtue of assigning it to multiple categories.

[Pete McNamara]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

@Remik. Exactly

@FlyBye76 It doesn't matter what they call it now - let's call it the trash file.

"Duplicate pages" from the same domain (see Remik's definition) end up in the trash file at Google and there are negative ramifications e.g. wasting internal PageRank.

Search engines hate duplicate pages as they clutter up their indexes. They don't care whether they are duplicate pages between sites or duplicate pages within a site, they hate them all equally and do everything they practically can to eliminate them. Because too many sites would be caught if they penalized duplicate internal pages, they don't directly penalize them but it is a mistake to think that there aren't negative ramifications from internal duplicate pages that end up in Google's trash bin.

[aarcmedia]

Re: Google penalty for SEO Settings?

Duplicate content CAN hurt a websites "ability" to rank. I have multiple examples I can share where a website ranked well despite having duplicate content, but once the duplicate content problem was fixed, traffic and rankings immediately picked up.

In the last 3 months, we've fixed duplicate content indexing problems on 3 different websites that used seo friendly links. In each case, theY implemented SEO friendly links throughout the website, without 301 redirecting the old URL's to the new URL's. Over time, the search engines found all of the new seo friendly pages and by the end had two versions of every product and category page indexed. We 301-redirected the mistake URL's to the proper URL and within 3 weeks both traffic and overall rankings in Google and Yahoo immediately increased by around 60%.

Granted, there could be additional factors at play here, and there were other improvements we made to the sites from an "on-page" standpoint, but in my experience, if you eliminate any and all duplicate content the right way (through a 301 redirect) you definitely provide your website a better chance to rank.

We constantly try to stress to our clients that your main goal as a website owner is to make sure you make the search engines life easy. The more you simplify things for the search engines while they're trying to organize data from your site, the more likely they are to reward you. That's a fact.

Another problem not many Miva store owners are aware of is in having duplicate links on a page as well. By default miva provides links TO a Product Page FROM a Category Page through both the product image as well as the product name. If it's true that search engine bots have a limit to how many links they'll crawl on a single page, you could see how you could be screwing yourself out of passing page rank and link juice to a lot of products on your category page. Say you have 30 links within your sites global header and category tree, and you list 50 products per page on your category page. If each product on the page has 2 different links coded (one for the image, one for the product name), that page now contains 130 links on it. If the bot only crawls 100 links per page, you have 30 products that now are not going to be crawled, making them less likely to rank on their own merit and get direct traffic from the search engines. Just another example of how making the search engines life more difficult harms your websites ability to rank.

Lastly, as Pete has stated over and over, all of this talk about short links, duplicate content and all other SEO related activities are all much less important than link building. If you're not building links for your website using whatever means are most accepted of any given day, month or year, you're website will never get the traffic its capable of.

Just food for thought. In the end, I agree that duplicate content is not an "END ALL". But as Pete said, it doesn't help and it is 100% WORTH WHILE TO TAKE CARE OF DUP CONTENT PROBLEMS.