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More Duplicate Google Content

Colin Colehour [PersonRank 10]

Friday, August 10, 2007
16 years ago2,866 views

Back in June of this year it was shown that Google had duplicated their Google Directory content across several domains that they own. Well the issue has gotten a little more widespread and affects the domains of recent acquisitions. The following domains can be altered to show content from a wide range of Google services: Zenter.com, Greenborder.com, Image-America.com, and even Google.org.

Example of Zenter.com domain showing Google News content:
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1265/1068348020_bd8d049737_o.png

So far I was able to find the following URLs that pull up Google content on a non Google domain name:

http://www.zenter.com/alerts
http://www.zenter.com/base
http://www.zenter.com/blogsearch
http://www.zenter.com/books
http://www.zenter.com/codesearch
http://www.zenter.com/coop
http://www.zenter.com/gmm/index.html
http://www.zenter.com/local
http://www.zenter.com/maps
http://www.zenter.com/news
http://www.zenter.com/products
http://www.zenter.com/schhp (Scholar)
http://www.zenter.com/Top/Arts/ (Google Directory)
http://www.zenter.com/translate_t

I did find a few services that redirected to the correct Google service URL. Those services were ig (iGoogle), mail & gmail, desktop, notebook, pack, sketchup, toolbar and video. For example, if you were to use www.zenter.com/video it redirects to the real Google video URL.

Are we going to see this happen more often as they acquire more companies?

Colin Colehour [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

A few more that show Google content on a non Google.com URL:
http://www.zenter.com/transit
http://www.zenter.com/trends

A couple more that redirect correctly are:
webmaster, adwords, adsense

Martin Porcheron [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Sounds like Google has just configured or written Google Web Server badly. (I thought they used Apache?)

Haochi [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

GreenBorder does the same...
ex. http://www.greenborder.com/news

>>I thought they used Apache?
They use tons of different web servers to serve different contents.

Colin Colehour [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

[put at-character here]Haochi, Essentially there are 5 URLs of each of the Google services that I listed above. So for News, the following links work:

http://www.google.com/news (Real Service)
http://www.google.org/news
http://www.image-america.com/news
http://www.greenborder.com/news
http://www.zenter.com/news

This is why I said the duplicated content is more widespread than just showing multiple versions of the Google Open Directory.

JohnMu [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Any host name that has Google's IP can do the same. Google handles duplicate content just fine (in web-search), I doubt we have to worry about it :-). There is a lot of duplicate content even on the google.com domain, but most of that is there to keep content in all language versions. That's not a problem, multiple domain names that point to the same server isn't a real problem either, no big deal, if you ask me.

Colin Colehour [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

[put at-character here]JohnMu, Besides the Google.org domain, the only domains I was able to find that show the duplicated content came from the most recent domains that were part of the latest acquisitions. You can't use hostnames like Sketchup.com or Writely.com to show Google news or any of the other listed services.

I don't have a problem with companies pointing multiple domains to the same website. I do have a problem when those domain names have nothing to do with the content its pointing to. Google has the resources to either turn off the duplicate content or at least redirect to the correct service URL.

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