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Duplicate content abuse?

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

Tuesday, March 13, 2007
17 years ago2,474 views

Do you think it's possible for someone to harm a website's pagerank by setting up doorway pages to the site on other domains or duplicating the full content of the page on many other domains? Assuming duplicate content gets penalized, could someone abuse the system in this way to target and harm a website?

I just noticed a website using a redirect of the format: http://www.website.com/gotosite.php?id=5453 that redirected to another website...that gotosite.php page got indexed even though it simply redirects and it got me thinking there might be potential for abuse in doing that on a larger scale to a single website.

Hong Xiaowan [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I guess google can judge which content is original and which is copies now. Duplicate content is cheating. And will harmful to itself.

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

mirror sites pollute the index's of all Search engines.. I do think that SE have a method to negate such pollution..

"When a search engine crawler fetches a page and finds out, that it's an exact duplicate of another page in the search engine's index, it changes the 'lastCrawled' attribute if the URL matches and moves on. If the URL doesn't match, the fetched page gets trashed. Comparing pages, the crawler performs a heuristic method for performance reasons, thus sometimes very similar, but not identical pages may be discarded 'by mistake'"

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Google once had this bit in their help pages (my emphasis):

<<Fiction: A competitor can ruin a site's ranking somehow or have another site removed from Google's index.
   Fact: There is *almost* nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index. Your rank and your inclusion are dependent on factors under your control as a webmaster, including content choices and site design.>>

"Almost"?
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2003_09_21_index.html#106415708901661467

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Hey, that's exactly what I was getting it (and I now recall seeing that post before :)

I don't know how even a human could look at a website and determine if a company set it up with the intention of boosting their pagerank and getting hits for different keywords (which should be punished) or a competitor setup the page to make it look like that was the case to harm the company's pagerank (this should be ignored/not punished). How would you know which is which, and what action to take? You can't just ignore in all cases because then there's nothing to discourage someone from setting up redirects/doorways and creating junk.

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