Most webmasters and search marketing specialists view the guidelines posted at Google Webmaster Central as “the rules” outlining techniques acceptable to Google. The Google guidelines are in fact the only actual written rules universally recognized through-out the SEO sector though they tend to be regarded more like municipal bylaws than federal, state or provincial legal code. Nevertheless, Google makes the rules for how their search enigne works and breaking those rules can have far reaching consequences. Given the extreme importance of Google to our clients, SEOs tend to respect Google’s civil bylaws.

Two guidelines SEOs perceived as being among the most important to Google have recently changed. The first covers duplicate content, the second covers dynamic URLs.

Duplicate Content
From canonical issues and poor website architecture to outright content theft, dupe content is rampant on the web. Sometimes it happens by mistake and sometimes it is copied and republished on purpose.

For Google, duplicate content presents a number of potential problems. When Google perceives several documents containing the same content, it has to determine which of those documents is the most relevant to search-users’ queries. It also has to decide which incidents of duplicate content have value to web-users and which incidents are not useful. News and information posts, for instance, are often replicated from site to site with good reason and honest intent.

In some cases it’s fairly straight forward. It is relatively easy to copy and paste and only marginally more difficult to scrape content from one page and place it on another. In some cases there is a good reason duplicate content might appear on multiple pages. For lazy webmasters and unscrupulous Made-for-AdSense faux-blogs, stealing content from other peoples’ pages and inserting that stolen content on their own pages is a method of acquiring digital assets to flesh out their sites. Beyond being extremely uncool, these content thieves are potentially damaging their websites’ chances for search placements, an ultimately dire disservice.

In other cases, it’s not so straight forward. In the search marketing industry, for instance, there are about a dozen prominent newsletters and news sites that share or reprint stories from other publications. Though a story might have been published on a company blog (like this one), that story might be reposted to an industry focused blog with a larger audience. Since search marketers tend to be good webmasters, proper attribution is offered and Google is better able to determine the original from the duplicate.

Understandably, there are a lot of factors Google’s engineers need to consider when thinking about sorting through documents containing duplicate content. Google has employed several methods of evaluating the “usefulness” of documents in its index to different users. Over time, those methods have improved, evolved and expanded.

Its primary method was to determine which of those documents contain original content and which contain duplicate content. At one time, Google would tend towards devaluing incidents of duplicate content when it was able to ascertain an original existed in its index. This devaluation has been called the “duplicate content penalty”, a descriptor that lives on today in the SEO lexicon.

About two years ago, Google started considering the geographic location of searchers before discarding documents containing duplicate content. In some cases, a document containing duplicate content might actually be more relevant to a searcher than the original. In Google’s electronic eyes, the most important deciding factor in regards to duplicate content is intent. Why does this content exist on this page?

In a September 12 post to the Google Webmaster Central blog, Google tries to demystify the myths associated with the duplicate link penalty.

Dynamic URLs
The address of a document on the web is called its URL. Metamend recommends and uses a static URL format. The URL of this post, for instance, is: http://www.metamend.com/blog/2008/09/23/google-webmaster-central-updates. While our website is fairly large, it is also fairly simple. Because ours is purely an information website, we do not need to assign identifiers to our website visitors and do not have to assign session IDs to pages drawn from our server.

If our business involved direct to consumer e-commerce or provided an individualized user experience by dynamically drawing information from a database, we would have to include product, page and visitor specific identifiers in the URL of the page served to each individual user. The URL of a post delivered to a visitor might read something like http://www.metamend.com/blog/2008/09/23/detail?id=00851245.

For several years, Google said it was unable to follow dynamic URLs for a number of reasons. To get around the problem, SEOs rewrote dynamic URLs to make them appear static, using scripts to serve the rewritten addresses as they were generated on the fly. This gave SEOs a significant advantage in that Google was able to read all pages in a dynamic site (provided a good sitemap was present) and search engine visitors were more likely to click on a link with a URL they could read and understand.

Earlier today, a post appeared at the Google’s Webmaster Central blog suggesting Google was better able to deal with dynamic URLs. Many in the SEO community however, remain unconvinced. The news garnered two unique posts at the SEM water-cooler/social media site, Sphinn, both of which have long comments sections filled with incredulous comment from SEOs. Google Says, Don’t Rewrite Dynamic URLS To Static URLs | Google says Stay Away From URL Rewriting! Seriously? (the first post has commentary from Google’s chief quality czar, Matt Cutts).

To boil the Google post to its essential kernels, Google is saying, “When most people try to rewrite dynamic URLs, they mess it up and that messes us up. Leave it to us to get it right when we spider.”

Ummm… no. The last thing a good SEO wants to do is give all the power to Google. I suspect the SEO community is not going to pay much attention to Google’s claim that they can parse dynamic URLs easier than they can parse static ones. There is great power found in giving Google keywords in the URL of a page and I have a hard time recommending giving up that power.