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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does omitted results shown by Google always mean that website has duplicate content?
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Google search results for a particular query was appearing in top 10 results but now the page appears but only after clicking on the " omitted results by google."
My website lists different businesses in a particular locality and sometimes results for different localities are same because we show results from nearby area if number of businesses in that locality (search by users) are less then 15.
Will this be considered as "duplicate content"? If yes then what steps can be taken to resolve this issue?
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It might go to supplemental index when:
- Content is not unique.
- No content at all or with very little content.
- You have pages, not determined to have content initially, such as sitemap, contact, Terms and Conditions, etc.
- Pages that don’t have titles/meta descriptions or have duplicate ones.
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Hi Prashant,
Yes - any URLs that are different are different in Google's eyes, unless the modifier is a # symbol.
So if you have www.example.com/key#value12345 and www.example.com/key#valuexyzabc, then Google sees these as the same, i.e. www.example.com/key. They will ignore everything after the # character.
All other query strings, etc., mean that the URL has changed and if the pages on those URLs are the same, it's duplicate content.
I hope this helps.
Cheers,
Jane
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Thanks Jane,
Will the following urls will be considered as two different urls?
1. www.example.com/key=value1& key2=value2
2. www.example.com/key2=value2 & key=value1
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Thanks David,
I found that a few of these urls were not crawled by Googlebot for a month or so. Now when i checked the last crawled status using "cache:", i found out that these pages were crawled again only recently and probably that is why it is back in top 10 results (main index).
I have one question: When does an url go into "Supplemental Index" ?
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Hi Prashant,
This sounds like removal due to duplication rather than DMCA - the omission is usually noted as being because of DMCA notices if they are the reason, e.g. http://img.labnol.org/images/2008/07/googlesearchdmcacomplaint.png
Google likely sees these as duplicates, or near-dupes, as David has said,
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Digital Millennium Copyright Act being used here? No.
OP, it does sound like you have duplicate content issues. See what you can do to make those omitted pages more unique.
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It's most likely because some one would have put a DMCA takedown on that Google search result. jump in to your Google WebMasterTools account and you should see some notification from Google about it.
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