Recent SEO work done by us on a massive ecommerce site (more than 8000 products) illustrated the importance of the duplication penalty and how it was affecting individual product pages and preventing them from achieving high-ranking SERPs.

I will try to highlight this issue, how we solved it, and how it subsequently produced a two-fold increase in traffic and hundreds of top 5 rankings in Google for individual product terms.

This issue first became apparent when our client asked us why many of his products were not showing up in keyword search results. We did some preliminary analysis and determined that a link on every product page that sent the visitor to a "Send this page to a friend" page was the culprit. Normally these "Send to a friend" scripts do not interfere with the search engines in any noticeable way. However this link was coded as a PHP script which essentially replicated exactly everything on the product page and just added a couple of form fields to allow the visitor to email the product page to a friend.

The following two links highlights the subtle differences between the normal product page and its parallel "Send to a friend" page.

tooldiscounter.com/ItemDisplay.cfm?lookup=OTC205049

and the "Send to a friend" link.

tooldiscounter.com/ItemDisplay.cfm?lookup=OTC205049&friendmail=getinfo

Notice the coding is not 100% identical between these two pages but it is identical enough (>80%) for Google to decide that it should not index both pages. For whatever reason the Google spiders ended up picking one or the other. Now it doesn't take an SEO specialist to tell you that the original product page will rank better than the "Send to a friend" version of the same page.
So we did the simple search in Google "site:www.tooldiscounter.com +friendmail" and found out that thousands of the "Send to a friend" version of the product pages had been indexed instead of the original product page. The following three figures illustrate the differences:

Figure 1 shows 72 results when you find all the specific "Send to a friend" Tooldiscounter pages that are remaining in the Google index. Note this was in the thousands before we took steps to get these duplicate pages out of the Google index so that the original product pages could be indexed instead. If you look at Figure 1 it shows that the first 4 results do not have descriptions and these appear to be results that are being phased out. In fact it is very likely that these results are already gone due to our recent efforts. The next 6 results show the remaining "Send to a friend" versions of the product pages that have not yet been marked for removal in the Google index. Figure 2 below show the results when you do a Google search specific for all the pages in the Tooldiscounter site that display the "SNX9914M" product. Notice only the "Send to a friend" page shows up and the original product page does not appear.

In comparison figure 3 (below) shows when you do a search for all the pages in the Tooldiscounter site that show the "OTC205049" product you see two pages. The old "Send to a friend" version and now the main product page which was not previously indexed. As a result this product page now ranks #6 on Google for "OTC-205049" which was unranked before.

Figure 3:

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SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services -- "Bringing you business one click at a time."

No this is not a blog post about her recent endorsement of Barack Obama for President. Rather it is a post to highlight the power of coverage in the media on a topic by a celebrity of the status of Oprah Winfrey. In mid-October Oprah discussed the topic of super foods on her show. Flax seed has often been included as a super food and its mention on the Oprah Show in mid October caused the total number of people searching for flax seed and flax seed related information to go up by 2-3 fold. Keep in mind that this was a transient phenomenon that was completely independent of any changes in the SERPs for our particular client.

Over the period of August 1st until now the direct traffic and non-search engine traffic was pretty much stable. However the search engine generated traffic to our client's site doubled and even tripled during about a two week period in October. The keyword phrases of "flax seed benefits" had a huge increase in searches throughout the month of October and also November. Those particular searches have decreased significantly almost back to the level seen in August. At first we thought maybe of client had lost ground on some of his high rankings in the search engines but after more analysis we cannot see any evidence for this. He is still #2 on both Google and Yahoo for this keyword.

#2 - flax seed benefits - Google
#2 - flax seed benefits - Yahoo

So it really seems that it was purely a function of public awareness and that the transient increase in the number of people searching for information on flax seeds was generated from the buzz from the Oprah Winfrey show. Of course we had helped position our client to be one of the first companies seen after people searched for flax related information and fully take advantage of the "Oprah Effect" when it happened.

This question was recently posed on one of the SEO forums that we monitor and it was a very interesting question that we have talked about before and have done a fair amount of analysis on.

The question was essentially this, ".... just how much weight does the age of a website get in the Google ranking algorithm".

And the question was framed in the context of will a website created in 2000 have an age advantage over a site created 2-3 years ago? Of course the sandbox affect for brand new sites is taken out of the equation.

Our simple answer to this is of course the age matters. It matters for your link popularity index, the age of your inbound links, the size of your site and the freshness of your site.

mjtaylor made the following comments: "Well, if there are 100-200 factors and this one is a fairly important one it should be worth a couple of percentage points. I would say this would be more important for a newer site than an older one ... in other words it's a negative factor to get over .... sometimes called the Sandbox ... but once your domain is a year old, the relative value decreases.

Similarly, the age of incoming links is a factor."

She seemed to indicate that the aging factor was predominantly important with regards to the sandbox affect. I agree that the sandbox affect is of a huge importance but for the purpose of this question we are taking the sandbox completely out of the equation. I don't believe the weight of the aging factor goes down after the sandbox affect goes away. The sandbox affect is really a separate issue and definitely plays a role in allowing a brand new site the ability to achieve SERPs but once a site is out of the sandbox it still has to compete against sites that could be 5 or 10 years old.

We have done some pretty extensive analysis and the age of a site seems to play a significant role. Enough so that I think we would consider it one of the top 20 factors in the Google Algorithm. Maybe even top 10.

We always recommend to our Minneapolis SEO clients that if they already have a registered domain name that they haven't completely developed that they are many times better off using the older domain than purchasing a brand new domain name instead.

Peter, a WebproWorld Veteran, also made some very intelligent comments on the basic question of site age: "In my experience I have seen webmasters complain for years that Google is stupid because their website was stuck around position 40. No matter what they did, they just couldn't get the site higher. Then after so many years, all the sudden the site starts to climb and it reaches the top10. Often webmasters try to figure out what they "did" to make that happen. But they didn't do anything special. All that happened was that they finally got to age. This often happens in markets that have been around for many years already. Imagine for example the hosting market. You really need to have a site that is reasonably old because most of the top ranking sites are many years old and the average age factors in this market are pretty high."

In a nutshell and with all factors the same a site that is 5 years old WILL in my opinion rank higher than one that is 2 years old.