Do Pages That Rearrange Set Off Any Red Flags for Google?
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We have a broad content site that includes crowdsourced lists of items. A lot of the pages allow voting, which causes the content on the pages (sometimes the content is up to 10 pages deep) to completely rearrange, and therefore spread out and switch pages often among the (up to 10) pages of content.
Now, could this be causing any kind of duplicate content or any other kind of red flags for Google?
I know that the more the page changes the better, but if it's all the same content that is being moved up and down constantly, could Google think we're pulling some kind of "making it look like we have new content" scheme and ding us for these pages?
If so, what would anyone recommend we do?
Let's take an example of a list of companies with bad customer service. We let the internet vote them up and down all the time, the order changes depending on the votes in real time. Is that page doomed, or does Google see it and love it?
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It sounds like the scenario you're describing isn't an issue of the URLs changing, but more so content shuffling within given URLs. This is VERY common. Google even promotes this with the Website Optimizer as they understand that a users experience with a website can vary from user to user, and having the flexibility to change to meet a specific user's needs is a good thing not bad. Unless the shuffling is dramatically affecting your own search traffic goals, I wouldn't be too concerned with it. Mostly I'd recommend strong categories for your pages that target your key search demographics and the archival of pages that have come and gone in their voting cycle. That way you'll have plenty of static content to work with as well.
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Yes this can be causing problems if it causes multiple versions of the same page. The best practice in this case is to set a canonical tag across the depth of variations, pointing to the version you want designated as the one to be indexed.
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