Google PR and Duplicate Content – What You Need to Know

The constant struggle to obtain and maintain a high toolbar pagerank with Google is many times done for no reason. The first thing that must be realized is that the PR shown on your toolbar for a particular site is not frequently updated. Not only that but it is not imperative to your position in the SERPS. Many webmasters think that if their site rises from a PR3 to a PR5 on the toolbar that their visitors will magically increase; this is simply not true. The fact is, the pagerank for your site is almost constantly updated so the actual pagerank can increase visitors but the toolbar rank will not.

There are some things that the toolbar PR is good for though. When you go out looking for link exchanges what is one of the main things you look at? I know I look at the toolbar to see if the site is new or established. This can be a great tool to see whether or not a potential link request would be worth it. Also, if you plan to sell links on your web site you will have no problem finding buyers with a high pagerank. So to say that the Google toolbar PR is not valuable would be a false statement.

Now, the infamous duplicate content issue. I recently watched a very informational interview with Vanessa Fox, Google Webmaster centrals product manager, in which she enlightened everyone on what exactly Google considers to be duplicate content. What I got out of the interview was that Google does not give duplicate content penalties for more than one page on a site. What they do is a form of content filtering, where only one of the duplicate pages will be indexed.

After watching the interview I started thinking about article directory submissions. After hearing this advise I now believe that mass submitting the same article to multiple directories is not bad at all. Many people have been speaking of this issue for some time now, some for it and some against it. If Google filters the duplicate content and only indexes one of those pages then why do more than one page with your article get indexed? I believe this is because each individual page has its own template and layout. I personally believe that mass submitting articles will not hurt you but Google must give it less weight in the SERPS, as it is in fact duplicate text. The page with the highest weight in Google would get the highest position in the SERPS for your article.

When it comes down to it, quality relevant links pointing to your site along with a lot of quality relevant content equal high SERPS placement. Continue to do only proven white-hat techniques and stop worrying about your toolbar pagrank and you will continue to increase your site visitors.

Joshua Spaulding is an Author and Webmaster providing Proven ways to Make Money Online. Joshua also runs a Quality Article Directory.