Part of Google’s terms and conditions is that each with with Adsense on it MUST have a privacy policy. This is all well and good, but most of them are pretty generic, and unless you are a lawyer you may want to use a standard one that is floating about on the Internet.
The problem is, Google has told us time and time again that you should do everything in your power to avoid duplicate content. We also know that if you have part of your site that must have duplicate content the easiest way to avoid it is to add a do not follow line to the robots.txt file.
This is great, and it works, but then how will Google know if you have a privacy policy or not, if you don’t allow it’s robots in there? Is there a guy employed on minimum wage to trawl through manually and make a note of it?
For now I have left it as it is, but I do wonder if Google will see it as duplicate content, along with half the Internet? Or is it clever enough to pick up on the keywords and turn a blind eye?
Stumble it!
May 20th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
This is an interesting question. You have got me thinking here and maybe I must change my copy of a generic policy slightly and then it cannot be duplicate content.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
very useful information. thank u a lot..
May 20th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
I have done a bit of research and it seems this question has been raised before. Some people block the bots with robots.txt, some people don’t.
My feeling is just to leave it and hope Google is clever enough to tell this is a privacy policy and won’t freak out over the duplicate content.
I think I may develop my own though, and because my sites will share an IP Google will know the sites are related and won’t penalise them (I hope).
I do think maybe I am over-analysing it a bit, but this seems to be another area covered by “Google-voodoo”. I wish they would be a bit more clear about how we can do things by the book.
May 20th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
If you do block it with robots.txt, I think you’d be pretty easily able to point out to Google that you do have a privacy policy without much trouble.
May 21st, 2009 at 4:21 am
“Duplicate penalty” is overhyped. It takes some real copying effort to get hit by it, one page is nothing.