Duplicated content penalty is a myth= .

It won’t affect you in any negative way.

I’m talking about duplication of an entire homepage here, not a couple lines of content! There’s nothing in that link you presented to suggest any other than a penalty. Please read your own citations before citing them!

Here’s the Google Webmaster ‘Quality guidelines – specific guidelines’ (end of page) warning against duplicate content, especially for subdomains: www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#quality

So you have no solution?

There are two indexable pages using a CNAME:

1) foo.myshopify.com 2) foo.com

The search engines index these ‘server 200’ responses as exactly that—two separate pages with the exact same content (ie. duplicates).

Search engines are not in the business of returning duplicate results to their customers. That’s not their business model. They do not value SERP-stuffing (ie. taking a page and getting it index 1000s of times across different domain names or aliases).

But whether you personally believe there is a negative impact or not is irrelevant. Can you offer any helpful comments on how to avoid duplication? I think we need a robot.txt exclusion of the foo.myshopify.com domain if using CNAME. Anybody else help?

I’m talking about duplication of an entire homepage here, not a couple lines of content! There’s nothing in that link you presented to suggest any other than a penalty. Please read your own citations before citing them!

Here’s the Google Webmaster ‘Quality guidelines – specific guidelines’ (end of page) warning against duplicate content, especially for subdomains: www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#quality

So you have no solution?

There are two indexable pages using a CNAME:

1) foo.myshopify.com 2) foo.com

The search engines index these ‘server 200’ responses as exactly that—two separate pages with the exact same content (ie. duplicates).

Search engines are not in the business of returning duplicate results to their customers. That’s not their business model. They do not value SERP-stuffing (ie. taking a page and getting it index 1000s of times across different domain names or aliases).

But whether you personally believe there is a negative impact or not is irrelevant. Can you offer any helpful comments on how to avoid duplication? I think we need a robot.txt exclusion of the foo.myshopify.com domain if using CNAME. Anybody else help?

How would such a robot.txt look like?

Even though duplicated content penalties are a myth (and I believe they are after having duplicated content in SE’s for years with no penalties), there are other reasons to discourage the use of both domain.com and www.domain.com

We use a .htaccess file to redirect anything at domain.com to the www.domain.com alternative. This way, search engines are permenantly redirected to the new files, and customers are too. Easy for everybody.

Check out this article: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19&highlight=htaccess

It explains how to write a rewrite rule that also gives a permenant redirect so the search engines can see it.

Robot.txt files are useless for the most part. Plus, to really see the effects of the penalty, you would have to have more than two copies of your pages on your two domains.

The ‘penalty’ is most often seen when Google gives you that message at the bottom of the page saying they have filtered out duplicate content for the site, along with a links to view all anyway: _In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 28 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included._

Tobi, if you had a checkbox that would tell Shopify to forward any requested subdomain.myshopify.com pages related to the new domain, that might take care of those frightened by the penalty myth and to make sure things are kept clean and customers are kept un-confused. :)

Cliff: ..| tell Shopify to forward any requested ..| subdomain.myshopify.com pages

Yes, that’s it. The best thing is simply to have the foo.shopify.com domain always resolve to foo.com (so you cannot type in ‘foo.shopify.com’ into the browser without the URL changing to foo.com). A 301 redirect on foo.shopify.com to foo.com will accomplish this (since the foo.com CNAME should resolve normally back to foo.shopify.com but with the foo.com URL in the address bar). I’d like to see some more comments on it coz I’m certainly not a genius about doing this.

No problem. I’ll add that.

Well, i don’t know exactly what will happen. It might be just an endless loop! I dunno. We need more comments from some people who might have done this before.

You know, I think I read somewhere that shopify is planning a self-hosted version of shopify (you don’t host stores at shopify’s subdomains, but rather publish to your own Web server). This would solve the entire problem. Is such a version in the works? That would be the golden ticket for all these advanced control issues.

Thats not true.

Having weird Google Webmaster reports, and I was hoping someone could help me to understand why.

They are claiming that I have duplicate title tags, but it looks like what they are actually indexing are queries:

Pages with duplicate title tags Pages
SleepySheep – Pet Woolies
‎/collections/pet-woolies‎‎/products/pet-woolies‎ 2
SleepySheep – Overlays
‎/collections/overlays‎‎/collections/types?q=Overlays‎ 2
SleepySheep – Bedding Packages
‎/collections/bedding-packages‎‎/collections/types?q=Bedding+Packages‎ 2
SleepySheep – Duvets
‎/collections/duvets‎‎/collections/types?q=Duvets‎ 2
SleepySheep – Pillows
‎/collections/pillows‎‎/collections/types?q=Pillows‎ 2

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

^^ A 301 redirect on foo.shopify.com to foo.com ^^

Tobi, did you ever add that?

I recently added the shopify cname to www.lovethehouse.co.uk
but if I type lovethehouse.myshopify.com it remains as is in the address bar, rather than forwarding to www.lovethehouse.co.uk

James