Is Google Falling Down On The Job?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, December 20, 2008 Comments (3)

There was an interesting story in Wired Magazine’s online edition yesterday. The Huffington Post is being accused of stealing content from smaller, local online news organizations. I won’t get into the details of that, but I would like to point out one thing that I believe may have exacerbated this conflict and it’s Google’s fault.

If you copy and paste a sentence from the original article at Chicago Reader you’ll find The Huffington Post’s story at No. 1. in Google. The Huffington Post’s story, as it were, is an exact duplicate of Chicago Reader’s. But Google’s stated policy on duplicate content is to index the original story and not the duplicates. Google has clearly failed to do that in this case. The question that begs, is why?

Here are some possibilities:

Perhaps it was just an oversight on Google’s part and not caught by the Google team

There is something amiss about Google’s duplicate content algorithm

Google favors larger sites with more content even if it finds duplicate information where the original appears on a smaller site

Google favors sites with higher authority even in duplicate content matters (The Huffington Post is a PR4 and Chicago Reader is PR0)

A combination of the above

The first two of these possibilities are easily fixable. Google can just find a better way to do its job and improve its ability to return the correct results. But if the third or fourth possibilities reflect reality then the entire Web community has a problem. What do you think it is and should we be concerned?

Comments (3) Category: Search Engines

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3 Comments

Comment by Andrew Brinkworth

Made Sunday, 21 of December , 2008 at 11:19 am

The issue I’ve always had with Google is perhaps their fascination with age. In that older websites will almost always get a higher ranking even if their content hasn’t been updated. This makes it difficult for new sites with up to date info to get traffic.
It seems that Google’s algorithm can be used by companies to find which sites are guilty of copyright infringement which could be a benefit in the short term.

Comment by Les

Made Monday, 22 of December , 2008 at 10:37 am

I think another issue is often in the speed that a page is indexed. Some site seem to be able to get their new content indexed within hours whereas others it can take a day.

You can speed up the process using social bookmarking. I also find that by simply subscribing to my own feed through Google seems to speed up indexing.

In this case, Huffington Post may well have been indexed first – anything Google finds is then secondary. It pays to link back to your own site when you first publish, even if you take that link out later.

les

Comment by Andrew Brinkworth

Made Wednesday, 25 of February , 2009 at 9:08 am

Another thing I’ve found that speeds up indexing is the Robot.txt file. If you don’t have one, get one NOW! since I installed one on one of my sites, Google hits me daily!
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