Lately, there has been a lot of speculation and out right fear of duplicate content penalties on your organic rankings if a comparison shopping engine is also displaying your content. The idea behind this is that if Google sees your content on let say thefind.com (which has been getting the most heat for this as it has started to surpass the actual merchant site in the search results) will they penalize your actual website and cause you to down rank.
I started searching for answers on this after reading a post on the Y Store Forums. It was not long after that when I found a post from the guys over at Solid Cactus on the FeedPerfect Blog. The blog post references a discussion with thefind.com themselves and goes on to explain in detail what is actually happening (that the merchants are being penalized, but due to the changes to the search algorithm that Google has made, thefind.com and other sites are ranking higher because they are being deemed “more credible sources “).
The post is a good read and I suggest it to anyone out there who has been “terrorized” by this duplicate content rumor.
Hope everyone had a good holiday weekend…
…now get back to work!
