Google to penalize websites with identical layout!

By KalingaTV Bureau On Sep 15, 2022 0

Google pays Rs 1338cr penalty to CCI — Image Credits: IANS

While internet browsing, you might have come across certain websites which are identical to each other. The similarity between the websites is not only with their interface but also with their content. These circumstances lead to confusion among the audiences who end up reaching a different website rather than their desired website. In the light of the latest update by Google, there rises a normal question in our mind about the penalty which Google imposes on these websites.

Many bloggers questioned Google’s john Muller about the situation and he replied to the question. The question asked was “if two websites that look the same still rank in Google Search”.

These were the Questions Asked

“We’re planning to share the same backend and frontend for our two brands.

We’re ranking quiet well with both of them in Google.

How big is the risk of penalization if we use the same HTML structure, same components, layout and same look and feel between the different brands?

What would be different are the logos, fonts and colors.

Or would you suggest migrating to the same front end but keeping the different experience between the two brands?”

But answering to these questions, John Muller confirmed that for equal layouts the websites will not be penalised and will face no negative action for search results.

Answering the question he said,

“First off, there’s no penalty or web spam manual action for having two almost identical websites.”

He further added:

“That said, if the URLs and the page content is the same across these two websites, then what can happen for identical pages is that our systems may pick one of the pages as a canonical page.

This means we would focus our crawling, indexing and ranking on that canonical page.

For pages that aren’t identical, we generally index both of them.

For example, if you have the same document on both websites, we’d pick one and only show that one in search.

In practice, that’s often fine.

If you need both pages to be shown in search, just make sure they’re significantly different, not just with a modified logo or color scheme.”

In his answers, Muller also mentioned about the priority of content though no questions were asked for the same.