Duplicate content - directly from the horse's mouth

[Ian J]

Interesting article appeared yesterday detailing Google's approach to duplicate content here

I must admit that I still need to do some work in this area on my "minor sites" but am having problems with my Round Tuit.

[Ender]

Well there's some good advice there, but the really important things; canonical urls, nofollow tags and consistent internal linking are beyond the scope of most people.

The best way to avoid duplicate content issues is to make sure that every internal page of your site has at least a few hundred words of unique text.

[yorganic]

This is an interesting article but doesn't really address the issue of duplicate content sourced from a manufacturers database...

I have a client that ranks well for many products and, the majority of which are sourced from one wholesale company and, that company supplies most of the UK market.

In this instance there are several thousand products and the wholsealer supplies the product descriptions for all resellers to use and, it is simply not cost effective to modify the descriptions to be unique.

I am sure that parts of my clients site are being penalised, the question is to what extent, this being something that is very difficult to assess.

[Ender]

I'd try putting up articles, FAQs, proper usage etc. to try and make the site more of a resource than the others out there.

[MartinHutchins]

So to get this straight in my mind...
If I had a .com domain like www.......com
and I also had the .co.uk and I also had the .eu
Then am I better off doing an httprefresh to repoint to the dotcom?
I was thinking I wanted to set the DNS up to show the same pages on the same server but to allow the URL to stay as .co.uk OR .co.je OR .eu depending on where the user is in the world when they are viewing the site.
Will Google see this as duplicate content though and hurt the search rankings for the .com pages?
They will all be looking at the same index.html so I cant really block it in robots.txt can I?
Please help a confused lad out,

cheers,
Martin

[Ender]

Hi Martin,

Welcome to the forum. Google have gone on the record as saying there's no duplicate content penalty for having multiple versions of the same site on different top level domains eg example.com and example.co.uk

What you will find though is that only one of them will rank for a search, as one will get quietly dropped in the vast majority of cases ie unless you own microsoft.co.uk.

I prefer to worry about and promote a single domain so I usually permanently redirect all my .com sites to .co.uk with a server htaccess command. That doesn't fit all situations though. Say you had a mature .com site with lots of links and you bought a new example2.co.uk domain and redirected the example2.com domain to it, you could run into problems.

If you have two domains and they are doing well, stick with the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" maxim.