Is Google Falling Down On The Job?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

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?

source : http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com