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Google Earth Gets Duped - by Google Earth
October 17, 2006
Conventional SEO wisdom has generally arrived at the point that claims duplicated content won't necessarily hurt you, but it won't really help you either. If you present Page X on two unique URLs, so goes the lore, engines don't know which version to pick, so they'll probably just pick one, although you don't necessarily have control over which one they'll decide to include.
That is, unless the engine owns Page X.
I was doing a little research on Google Earth, so I typed what I figured would be the correct URL: www.google.com/earth. Google is usually really good about guessing what people will type, and if that person is wrong, redirecting him to the proper page. But I wasn't wrong, because Google Earth did resolve at that address.
But I clicked around for a while, and wouldn't you know it, before long I was on the earth.google.com subdomain, and I was pretty sure I hadn't been redirected.
So www.google.com/earth/ and earth.google.com are identical. But, no big deal, right? After all, won't Google simply decide which of its pages to show in a query for [google earth]?
Not necessarily. Following is results page for that query (notice the listings in red boxes):
![The first and seventh results for [google earth] go to the same page](http://seoblog.intrapromote.com/google-earth-serp2.jpg)
The bottom line is, despite the fact that Google says "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content," Google gives itself double the exposure on the results page because it has the same content sitting on two different URLs. Kids, if you try this at home, don't expect the same results. (And wear a helmet.)
And as a neat parlor trick, the two different entries for the page (again, boxed in red) even have faux differences. The top listing shows the DMOZ description for Google Earth. The lower listing shows copy pulled from the page body.
Oh, and notice that boxed in yellow, the exact same thing happens with Wikipedia. The only difference is an internal redirect on the Wikipedia site between /Google_Earth and /Google_earth. Get it? When you're Wikipedia, a character in lowercase is enough to get you a dual listing - to the exact same content.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at October 17, 2006 11:31 PM
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