I would love to get more info from those with experiences like that before making a move. One person I asked who had many many years of experience said that it would be bad to redirect from the older domain to the younger domain – partly because the older domain had link value from aged links that were ‘grandfathered’ and a lot of Google’s new rules on restricting PR don’t apply since they were there before the rule changes.

Let us know if you talk to someone who is a super expert on the effects of PR effects of redirects.

The original site was hosted at http://www.welcomehomepetsitting.com and despite having some on site SEO issues, had achieved a PR2. I decided to launch a new site at http://www.welcomehomepetsitting.net as part of my SEO testing at the time. Once the .net site was complete and I no longer wanted to keep the .com site up, I redirected the .com to the .net (301, obviously…). It took a couple months for the Google toolbar to account for the redirect, but the .net now appears to have inherited the PR from the .com being redirected.

So, if you were to take down the site located at “Domain A” and 301 redirect that domain to “Domain B” the PR achieved by “Domain A” should flow to “Domain B” via the redirect. It’s my understanding that this is how it is supposed to work, and in my case it appears to have happened as expected…though it did take some time for the PR to be reflected properly (since Google doesn’t update their PR scores regularly…).

Good question! I’d love to hear from others’ experiences with 301 redirects and inheriting PR accordingly…since I can only speak to my one measly experience. ;)

So this doesn’t seem to be a full blow penalty – perhaps more similar to what might happen with canonicalization. (The other version isn’t knocked completely out of the SERPs, but it won’t rank high for anything either)

Then the problem is that the owner doesn’t like Domain A (The one with all of the PageRank and Aged inbound links, and high rankings) and wants Domain B to be promoted strongly from now on to eventually replace Domain A.

So some questions emerge – what happens if Domain A disappears – does Domain B move up in the SERPs to replace it? What happens if we just redirect everything from A to B? What happens if we don’t do anything – does Google eventually kick in the penalty even though they haven’t yet (it’s been this way for years before I got here).

You’d think that country-specific URLs containing duplicate content would be among those whose rankings aren’t affected by duplicate content…in a perfect world. :)

I guess the question that begs to be asked is does anyone know for sure how Google interprets canonical homepage issues? If having canonical homepage issues is deemed “malicious” (meaning doing so is an attempt to monopolize search results and prevent competitor pages from ranking as well) wouldn’t a penalty be warranted?

Or does Google simply attribute such issues to general SEO ignorance and ignore the “duplicate content” issues that result from hosting the same homepage content at multiple URLs? If anyone has documentation of canonical homepage issues having a measurable negative impact on ranking, I’d love to see it!

Where the “penalty” portion of the duplicate content issue might take effect is when there are duplicate internal pages on a site. Just yesterday I audited a site that was hosting their home page on 3 separate URLs, http://domain.com, http://www.domain.com, and http://www.domain.com/index/

Now, a filter would be a great thing in this case as no matter what the user will find the site they are looking for and the SERPs will not be overloaded with duplicate content. Fantastic. But what if there IS a Google penalty for duplicate content? Should this website, obviously built by SEO-less webbies, be penalized for trying to serve people content in every way they saw fit? Probably not.

I guess in the end the point here is that I’m glad Google clarified the terminology here. While it might seem like common knowledge or trivial to most people, now I have something trustworthy to quote to clients if all of a sudden they hear that they could be penalized for duplicate content.

Not that any of my clients would have forgotten to 301 their homepage directories anyway….

The fact is that there are a lot of pages out there with duplicate content issues, whether internal or external…and some scraper sites outrank the original source, which is proof enough that Google has some unresolved issues in dealing with duplicate content. Whether or not the technical term is correct, it likely feels like a “penalty” to those whose pages are outranked by scraper sites.

I missed out on the days of the supplemental index, so I can’t speak to any personal experience with that. From what I understand at this point, Google claims there is no longer such a thing as the supplemental index, so…I guess that’s one thing I can leave off my “still need to learn about…” list. :)

I believe any attempt to provide legitimate, relevant search results is worthwhile. I just question Google’s attempt to play with the semantics of “penalty” vs. “filter” when ultimately the goal is the same – to avoid including pages with substantial amounts of duplicate content within SERPs.

Isn’t part of the goal also to prevent a single version of a page hosted at multiple URLs from monopolizing SERPs and gaining an unfair advantage over competitor’s pages by pushing them out of the top few pages of results? I can only assume that played into the initial conversations regarding duplicate content back in the early days…

The message I got from Google’s post is this — you can have a large, well-ranking, content-rich site and yes, if a few articles are duplicated elsewhere, who cares? There’s a possibility of a *filter*, which in my mind is still different from a *penalty* because I assume a penalty would afflict all pages of a site rather than just pages with substantial duplicate content.

Back when supplemental results existed I think this was pretty noticeable — with big CMS sites that had maybe one or two lines of unique content on dozens of sub-sub-pages, those pages would get dumped into the supplemental index (and I saw more than one site tank for really competitive keywords when a legitimate page got sucked into “supplemental hell”).

While I don’t agree with all of Google’s policies, this one seems pretty fair to me, since it essentially gives you a safety net if you’re not savvy enough to correct duplicate content problems with link soloing or robots.txt methods.