Duplicate Content Penalty After Social Bookmarking
“Hi Duncan I do have a question: After many years of developing my own sites and a few client sites, and, by good luck or well written content, I have had every page on every website indexed by Google.
Until now. For the very first time I started a bookmarking (linking) campaign a few weeks ago to promote a specific section of my own website. I got a few people creating a few links – not a massive amount – but, a week or so into that and that particular section of my website (which previously had a measly PR1) was booted into the supplemental index. One day it had a bit of Google PR and the next it was gone from rankings altogether. All the best” ~ Martin Koss
Hi Martin,
It sounds like you’ve been hit by a duplicate content penalty.
Whenever a page (or set of pages) falls into the supplemental index, it basically becomes “supplemental to the requirements of Google” to provide that information to their visitors. That means those visitors can get that exact same information (or near identical) when searching on the related keyword terms from elsewhere within Google’s index.
What’s likely to have happened here is that due to all of the social bookmarking, Google is seeing one of those bookmarking websites as being more relevant to the actual page/s on your own website.
The specific factor that’s caused this is hard to speculate on but it would be a combination of the following;
You’ve probably not got enough unique content on the pages in question.
You’ve probably submitted too much content to the bookmarking websites – generally in relation to the descriptions used. This is closely related to the above.
The bookmarking website holds much more authority on the subject in question than your own website (you can also read that as has much better Page Rank and theme relevancy) and therefore has been selected as the primary choice to provide that content in Google’s index.
Ultimately to address the problem (if you’re concerned about it) you could try adding more unique content to the pages in question and / or increase incoming links to the specific content on your website (but not from social bookmarking websites).
I haven’t seen this happen that often in the past and it is pretty unusual. So, if after reading this you become concerned about social bookmarking don’t be.
Just be sure you don’t submit too much content to the bookmarking websites.
It’s also good practice to use different titles and descriptions for each submission of the same page to each social bookmarking website. It means each of those submissions will stand a better chance of ranking on their own, as will your own page, without any one of them impacting on the other.
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Surely that cant be true about social bookmarking websites and duplicated content? If that were the case then you could bookmark all your competitors webpages and get them put into the supplemental index if they had little PR.
I wouldn’t have thought anyone would post a majority of the page/article in the social bookmark description for that page which is the only way it would be a duplicate content issue isn’t it? Bookmarking sites save a snippet and link to the original article, they would even probably pass PR and traffic to the original article.
I would think that what happened is that the page had little to no inbound links and these links either were removed or they dropped in their PR. Therefore the measly PR of this page dropped even further and because it had little content google therefore dumped it into their supplemental index.
“I would think that what happened is that the page had little to no inbound links and these links either were removed or they dropped in their PR. Therefore the measly PR of this page dropped even further and because it had little content Google therefore dumped it into their supplemental index.”
The only reason a page goes supplemental is because of duplicate content – not because it has little or no links of value (or does and then loses them). What is possible here is that the content on the page in question in the first place was not unique (or unique enough), and as a result was thrown into the supplemental index.
“Surely that cant be true about social bookmarking websites and duplicated content? If that were the case then you could bookmark all your competitors webpages and get them put into the supplemental index if they had little PR.”
Think about it like this. A page (perhaps the page in question) has very little written content – lets say a paragraph explaining a product. The rest of the page contents are images etc. The bookmark made to the social bookmarking website uses the same paragraph in the submission as the description – and the title of the page is also the same. In such an instance, yes this can happen, but not very often at all. As far as doing that to your competitors it’s highly unlikely as most people have more content on the page and there is a limit as to description length when submitting via social bookmarking websites.
As I said above, it’s hard for me to pin point exactly what happened here without knowing the page/s that have dropped and seeing what’s going on. But again, it’s likely to be combination of all of the above factors listed or lie somewhere amongst them. There’s not too much else that would cause this. My guess is probably the first on the list; “You’ve probably not got enough unique content on the pages in question.”
I’m curious to know whether pages which are in the supplemental index still have their links counted by Google. What’s your theory on this?
I have a number of sites that have been created purely for the purpose of providing links to other sites, I’m not concerned if these sites are in the main index or not, I only want their links registered.
I don’t believe that getting duplicate content on a social bookmarking site will be detrimental to your site. I’m confident that the search engines (Google) can work out that a site is a bookmarking site and therefore any site linked from the content will be exempt from any penalties.