In this video by Matt Cutts, answers the question “If you had to deal with short-term duplicated content on a news site (perhaps publishing a story on two different URLs over one day), what would you do in order to avoid any penalty from a duplicate content filter?” by Computerklaus, São Paulo, Brazil
Video Transcription
Matt Cutts: We’ve got a question from ComputerKlaus who asks, if you had to deal with short term duplicated content on a news site, perhaps publishing a story on two different URLs over one day, what would you do in order to avoid any penalty from a duplicate content filter?
I’m assuming this is white hat, high quality news publisher and you have short term duplicate content that you really don’t want to have, but maybe there’s a shooting or something. You have breaking news. One thing that you can do is use the Rel Canonical tag because even if you have multiple copies of a short story, you’ll be dividing the page rank between those multiple stories.
If it’s all on the same topic where all of these stories are on the exact same incident and they’re very close to duplicate, I would use Rel Canonical to point to one home URL and that will help clarify that okay, I might short term have some duplicate stuff while this is breaking news, but after things get all cleaned up, this is the standard spot, the preferred location on the web where I’d like this information to sit.
If you do that and you don’t have huge amounts of duplicate text all over your site, then you should be in pretty good shape as far as avoiding any sorts of spam action or anything along those lines.
Rel Conical Tag
If you want to find out more about Rel Conical Tags, here are some useful links:
