Comments on: Froogle Remnants & Google Product Search/Directory Duplicate Content Issues

By: eCopt

eCopt — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 21:30:10 +0000

@ Tim McGuiness – Tell me about it Tim, sometimes just thinking about it makes me cringe, but I do like being able to say, “Hey, you’re not practicing what you preach.”

I spoke with members of the Webmaster Central team at PubCon, they informed me that they had seen the blog post and that others who had seen it made them aware of the same issue, so I guess the message is getting across, although they haven’t fixed any of it yet.

I will continue to update the post as the issues get resolved or as soon as I notice some action, or lack of action being taken. Thanks for the continued support and comments!! Saw your MBL avatar finally got updated, nice!

By: eCopt

eCopt — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:38:06 +0000

@ g1smd - Thanks for commenting on this. I forgot to mention the directory.google.com pages, so thanks for adding that in. It gets to me because they do it on nearly all of the versions on nearly all of their urls/subdomains, just can't understand why they take time to do it on some and not all (like trailing slashes and www and non-www versions and not certain subdomains, or vice versa). By Froogle pages, do you mean the Shopping List pages or the ones that duplicate the Google Directory/Product Search? Their are no more results labeled as "supplemental," they stopped doing that awhile ago. Either way, the pages are indexed and fall under Google's own definition of duplicate content. Also, wouldn't you think they would use their own remove url feature (within Webmaster Central) for these pages as they are not the preferred versions? Like I said, I understand it can be really hard to find duplicate content and manage it all, but if you wrote the algo on it, it should be easier!! They do handle many of their pages well, however it is obvious that some do get overlooked.

By: g1smd

g1smd — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:28:59 +0000

The Froogle product pages that are already serving a redirect are probably all Supplemental Results. Once a URL changes from serving content to being a redirect, it gets tagged as Supplemental and may hang around in the index for a year or more. Those URLs are not an issue if they are redirects.

The directory has been available at http://www.google.com/Top/ and at http://directory.google.com/Top/ for a long time, but I wasn’t aware of the additional copies that you have highlighted.

The ODP itself has recently sorted out their own domain canonicalization issues. Previously, the ODP site was available through more than 27 domain name and direct IP address variants under their own control.

By: Tim McGuiness

Tim McGuiness — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 17:00:30 +0000

Wow. Really cool post, eCopt.

I’m curious to see how Google responds. Lately, they’ve been repeatedly caught saying “do as I say and not as I do”

Please report back on this.