Duplicate Content Filtered Out of Search Results

There are many reasons why pages don’t show up in search engine results.

One place where this is true is when the content at more than one URL, is almost the same at each location it is seen at by a search engine.

Some duplicate content may cause pages to be filtered when served by search engines. There is no guarantee which version of a page will show in results and which won’t. Duplicate content may also lead to some sites and pages not be indexed at all or may result in a search engine crawling program stopping the indexing of the pages of a site because it finds too many copies of the same pages under different URLs.

There are a few different reasons why search engines dislike duplicate content. One is that they don’t want to show the same pages in their search results. Another is that they don’t want to spend resources indexing pages that are almost the same.

I’ve listed some areas where duplicate content exists on the web or seems to exist to crawling and indexing programs. I’ve also included a list of some patents and some papers that discuss duplicate content issues on the web.

Where search engines see duplicate content

1. Product descriptions from manufacturers, publishers, and producers copied by a number of different distributors in large ecommerce sites

When more than one site sells the same products, they often use text from the manufacturer or producer of the product as product descriptions on their pages. Add to that the fact that the name of the product and the name of the creator, manufacturer, writer, or recording artist may also be on the page, there may be a considerable amount of content showing up on pages that aren’t related to each other but offer the same products.

2. Alternative print pages

Many sites offer the same content on different pages formatted for printers. If the site owner doesn’t use robots.txt disallow statement or a meta “noindex” tag on these pages to keep search engines from indexing them, they may appear in search engine indexes.

3. Pages that reproduce syndicated RSS feeds through a server side script

When RSS feeds are shown on pages besides pages of the site where they first appeared, and that text shows using a server-side include that presents the information as HTML on the pages, then it could appear as duplicate content on those other pages. When feeds use client-side includes, such as javascript, it is much less likely that a search engine will pick up that content and index it.

4. Canonicalization issues, where a search engine may see the same page as different pages with different URLs

Because search engines index URLs rather than pages, it’s possible for them to index the same pages presented in different ways. A “canonical URL” is one determined to be the “best” URL for a page, but search engines don’t always recognize that the same page is being presented in many ways. For example, the following URLs may all point to the same page:

http://www.example.com https://www.example.com http://www.example.com/index.htm https://www.example.com/index.htm http://example.com https://example.com http://example.com/index.htm https://example.com/index.htm

5. Pages that serve session IDs to search engines, so that they try to crawl and index the same page under different URLs

Some sites serve information in their URLs to track visitors as they go through the pages of a site. If this type of tracking information is provided to search engine crawling programs, then those programs may index the same page under different URLs, repeatedly. See, for instance, http://www.sears.com

As the Google Webmaster guidelines tell us:

Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but point to the same page.

6. Pages that serve multiple data variables through URLs, so that they crawl and index the same page under different URLs

Some sites show different data variables in their URLs. In this instance, an example shows this well:

http://www3.jcpenney.com/jcp/Products.aspx? DeptID=469 &CatID=29841 &CatTyp=DEP &ItemTyp=G &GrpTyp=SIZ &ItemID=0e273be &ProdSeq=2 &Cat=tees+%26+tanks &Dep= &PCat= &PCatID=28237 &RefPage=ProductList &Sale= &ProdCount=32 &RecPtr= &ShowMenu= &TTYP= &ShopBy=0 &RefPageName=CategoryAll.aspx &RefCatID=28237 &RefDeptID=469 &Page=1 &CmCatId=469|28237|29841

A search engine can try to index the page above with all of those data variables in different orders.

7. Pages that share too many common elements, or where those are very similar from one page to another, including title, meta descriptions, headings, navigation, and text that is shared globally.

This is a frequent problem for large eCommerce sites that insist on having their brand name, and information about that brand in every title on every page of their site, and use content management systems that don’t allow them to have distinct meta description tags for each page of their site.

8. Copyright infringement

When someone copies the content on your site, it may cause your pages to be filtered out of search results (I haven’t seen this happen and wonder if it might not.) A site like copyscape may help you find some of these pages. Searching for unique strings of text on your pages, in quotation marks, may help uncover others.

9. Use of the same or very similar pages on different subdomains or different country top level domains (TLDs)

Using different subdomains and different top-level domains for the pages of your organization may be a nice way to create different brands, or focus on different kinds of content, services, or products. But duplicate content from one to another may create the risk that some of your pages don’t get indexed by search engines, or are filtered out of search results. Again, from the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

10. Article syndication

Many people create articles, and offer them to others as long as a link and attribution to the source is made. The risk here is that the search engines may filter out the original article and show one of the syndicated copies.

11. Mirrored sites

Mirrors of sites used to be very popular, for when a site became so busy that people could use an alternative source to get to the same information or content. Larger sites that might have used mirrored sites in the past often use multiple servers and load balancing these days, but mirrors do still exist (and the Wikipedia has a nice article about mirrors explaining why). Search engines may be able to recognize duplicated URL structures of mirrored sites and may ignore some mirrored sites that they find.

Patents Involving Duplicate Content

Papers About Duplicate Content

Duplicate Content Conclusions

If you are having difficulties with the pages of your site showing up in search engines, or if they show up as supplemental results or they seem to be disappearing from the index of a search engine, this is one of the areas to explore fully to see if duplicate content issues are harming the pages of your site.