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Are You A Canonical Fascist? Stand Tall!
November 28, 2007
We are sticklers with our clients when it comes to issues of content duplication, sometimes to the point, I think, of being viewed as Canonical Fascists. This can be annoying, much like fascism mostly can be annoying, so it is gratifying to see Mr. Google himself lay out just why such annoyance is worthwhile advocacy, even approaching the subject of PageRank Splitting in the process:
When I did a wget from the Googleplex, I eventually got a 301 from the seomoz.com url to the seomoz.org url. But look at the timestamps: " --09:28:33-- " was the initial fetch and "--09:32:41--" was when the 301 came over the wire. Assuming that I'm reading right, that means almost a four minute delay on getting the 301 from seomoz.com to seomoz.org. Googlebot will wait around for several seconds for a page, but it won't wait four minutes. Instead, the connection will time out and we'll treat those urls as separate (and think that we couldn't fetch the seomoz.com url). So if a bunch of people are linking to your article, and some link to seomoz.org and some link to seomoz.com, that PageRank is getting split between two urls, and the long delay on the 301 response can cause Google to believe that the urls are separate and therefore cause dupe issues.
Hat tip to Randfish for calling forth such manna in his heavily commented comments area.
see all posts by John Lustina
posted by John Lustina at November 28, 2007 03:45 PM
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