Google Duplicate Content Filter

I made an interesting observation yesterday about the Google Duplicate Content Filter with a set of new sites. It's a long story - hold in there!

A new customer came to me to develop his suite of sites. He already had the URLs and had published the corporate site (GFS) and all of the other sites had holding pages. He wanted some layout and text changes to GFS so we got them in first and published them. But he wasn't happy with the suite of holding pages. These showed the sites would be ready months ago and were linked to from the GFS site and mentioned in literature. Rather than give a poor impression, the corporate site was copied to all of the other URLs.

So we've got several versions of the same site on different URLs. All of the URLs had already been cached and had Google Page Rank 0. So what would happen?

Step forward a few weeks to Monday and I published the first of the ecommerce sites (MPL Direct). Fine, that's now not duplicated.

For some strange reason, one that I can't remember, I was looking at the search results of the sites late yesterday. And I noticed that only 1 version of the corporate site is now published, even though there are loads about. Quite interestingly, it's the copy on the MPL Direct site. So even though a lot of the text didn't change or changed only a little on the GFS site, that site has been removed as duplicated in favour of the site that's only just had the content published. None of the other sites are cached.

The other twist in the tail is that by luck, it's the first site that we've gone live with. So as soon as Google visits that site, it will now no longer count that sie as duplicate to the rest of the suite. Will that mean that one of the others suddenly takes the role of lead site according to Google?

No idea why this one was chosen as the favourite. GFS had the text, or nearly the same text, for months before. GFS was registered long before MPL, which was registered in a batch of sites. Both have PR0, but GFS has 6 pages PR0, MPL Direct just the 1 page.

The strange think is, another URL is appearing as favourite today - one that I haven't yet been given control of, but one with a copy of the original GFS site.

Something to watch for anyway.But the moral of the story is that if you think buying multiple URLs to increase your traffic, make sure they do all have unique content.