Polyfetish

In my prior entry I noted how Google had slapped Down On My Knees into the ground when it modified the mysterious math that generates the search results in an effort to clean out the spam bloggers who were littering the results with their blog, which existed only to promote commercial porn sites.

As I watched my traffic build back up and ebb I had to wonder if there weren’t any other factor at play. I’d read that Google was tightening up its duplicate content filters. Essentially Google sees no reason to display pages that contain identical information. This helps it keep out sites that just regurgitate, say, the contents of the Wikipedia or DMOZ with ads attached.

As anyone has seen some of my sites knows I like to pack my sidebars with all manner of things: extracts from visitor comments, links to the category indexes, etc. So on a page that contains only an illustration and a few remarks there is probably more stuff that appears on all 1,000+ pages of my sites that original words. And even on a page with a long original essay the distinctiveness of the page is diluted.

I’ve trimmed back the duplicate fat some. Probably not enough. I want people to see those comments in hope they’ll prompt the reader to add some of their own: you know how shy most people on the web are. And I want the navigational elements in hope it will cause visitors to a page to explore others.

It is tough to be torn between doing something that you hope benefits the visitor and offending the Search Engine Dominatrix.

In looking at Down On My Knees listings on Google I kept noticing that the content quoted in the portion of the page shown was the beginning of the comments section of the sidebar. That spawned two thoughts:

End of Part II