MSN Live Search takes on duplicate content
Microsoft’s Live Search is getting aggressive with duplicate content, reports Web Pro News.
According to WPN’s Brian Turner, MSN’s filters are now detecting content reproduced from other sites on a far stricter basis than any of their competitors and penalising the rankings of the sites concerned.
The development could be bad news for websites that rely on affiliate content; where extracts of the same text might appear on many other sites.
Google and Yahoo also penalise duplicate content to encourage originality and prevent sites that ’scrape’ others’ content from achieving high search engine rankings, though MSN appear to have lowered their threshold for what counts as duplicate text.
Turner reported that while one of his affiliate clients was still performing well on Google, their rankings dropped significantly on MSN’s Live Search.
Although Microsoft’s market share is relatively low, he speculated that MSN’s lead in taking an even tougher line on duplicate content could signal a wider trend among the search engines.
“…if something flags as wrong on MSN or Yahoo, that should be regarded as something as a canary for Google.” warned Turner. “After all, MSN today, Google tomorrow?”
If Google and Yahoo follow MSN’s lead then affiliate marketers won’t be the only sites hit; content like press releases will also be affected.
“While Google will push [duplicate] copies aside, it will still record them as existing so you can view them accordingly.” says Turner.
“[MSN] will only return a single version, with no option to view other copies.” he continues.
If copies of duplicate content of this kind are expunged completely from the search engine indexes it will become difficult, if not impossible to trace press releases and articles picked up by other sites. Additionally, any benefits, whether in terms of increased traffic or inbound links, will also be lost.
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