You know what, search engines frown upon the duplicate and similar content.
 
Or, rather, scratch that. What I wanted to say is that certain problems become utterly easy when you know which algorithms to apply. And, since I was lucky to touch some graph search stuff recently, I would like to share a few insights with you, – using a simple yet practical example. For reasons of brevity, some details got omitted (they should be easy to grasp from source code though) but if anything is unclear – don’t hesitate posting a comment or two!
 
So, back to search engines and duplicated content now. The “threshold similarity” will obviously depend on a concrete search engine, but generally pages are penalized with lower ranks for being similar to other pages. And even if you don’t deliberately copy-paste, there’s a chance to screw up, so one need to stay informed and keep the similarity low.
 
Therefore let’s help our friendly neighborhood SEO optimizer and build him a SharpShooter report about duplicate content! Say, a list of page URLs grouped or highlighted when they’re dangerously similar. Read the rest of this entry »