The Allegra algorithm update in February 2005 brought about ranking changes in the SERPs. However, there was a bit of confusion over the exact cause of some websites losing their top positions in the search results. There were speculations that it was because Google tweaked the Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI system while others believed that the search engine was imposing penalties on websites with suspicious inbound links.
Google was confident that the update continued the search engine’s focus on improving relevance in the results by reducing spam websites. This conclusion was deduced after Allegra was rolled out since several shady sites were no longer listed in the SERPs after the update. Nonetheless, there was no clear statement from the developers on the changes they implemented.
It’s believed that the Allegra update affected these three areas: duplicate content, suspicious links, and LSI. As a result, there were several site operators who lost their place at the top of the results pages as others took over those positions. It caused a big stir in the webmaster community, but not as much as the significant upset felt over the Florida update; although this one was the most talked about since.
Here’s an in-depth look at each of the affected areas:
Moreover, some webmasters thought that the update affected the Google Sandbox, which is a spam tool or filter utilized by the search engine. Typically, it’s used on newly-launched websites that appeared to be conducting suspicious online activity by adding a considerable amount of new content within a very short time. The premise was that any site that’s able to add several new posts at once must be piling up duplicate content or doing search engine spamming.
Until today, duplicate content still hurts your SEO strategies. While your site may not be penalized for having similar posts within it, your domain and page authority suffers. Google prioritizes unique content and wants to provide users with diverse results. With this, they choose to consolidate articles that look the same and show only one version.
It’s crucial that you eliminate duplicate content in your website because:
These are some ways to solve your duplicate content issue: