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An expired domain name may now be subject to a temporary penalty. This is important, because it implies

an additional delay before a site begins to rank well. In some cases Google will even refuse to index the

pages at all during that period, leaving a web site vulnerable to content theft. Content theft is discussed

at length in Chapter 5, “Duplicate Content.”

It is also likely that Google devalues any links that are acquired before the re-registration of the domain.

At the time of writing, other search engines do not appear to penalize previously expired domains.

Duplicate Content Penalty

Search engines attempt to avoid indexing multiple copies of the same content — duplicate content. Many

search engine optimization experts hypothesize that not only does a search engine not index such pages,

but it also penalizes a site for having the duplicated content.

This is a subject of much debate, but in any case, having duplicate content will not improve the rankings

of a site in any of the major search engines. Therefore, duplicate content should be avoided, and this book

devotes an entire chapter to the subject.

The Google Supplemental Index

This is not strictly a penalty in and of itself, but it may be the result of one. Google stores its crawled

search data in two indexes: the primary index and the

supplemental index

. The supplemental index

stores pages that are less important to Google for whatever reason. Results from the supplemental

index typically appear at the end of the results for a Google query (unless the query is very specific),

and the results are marked as supplemental results.

Figure 2-1 shows how a supplemental result is denoted in a Google search results page. Factors that lead

to inclusion of that link in the supplemental index rather than the primary index are the lack of signifi-

cant unique content or a lack of inbound links to the said content. It may also be as a result of explicit

penalization.

Figure 2-1

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Chapter 2: A Primer in Basic SEO

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