Do search engines penalise websites using unoriginal source code?

TALLMALEUK · Feb 7th, 2008, 18:34

Hi everyone,

Can anyone tell me if the search engines penalise unoriginal source coded websites like the of the shelf dating website software packages like Emeeting and Boonex etc which are sold to lots of people and used to start websites? Because i heard that search engines like google for instance penalise these types of website because they do not use original source code.

Many thanks

saltedm8 · Feb 7th, 2008, 20:13

no, it is not true, lets say you went and got a cms system , joomla for example ( thousands of these about - never made any difference ), - it does not penalise for 'duplicated web content or code' only for incorrect markup

alexgeek · Feb 7th, 2008, 20:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by saltedm8

..only for incorrect markup

I think Mike's going to disagree with you there

unitedcraig · Feb 7th, 2008, 20:25

lets not start all this again

TALLMALEUK · Feb 7th, 2008, 20:34

Alexgeek,

Can you tell me your thoughts on the matter? Do search engines penalise unoriginal source coded websites? And these software packages for instance joomla and boonex capable of coping with unlimited users as some of the text on some of their websites would suggest?

Many thanks

Lchad · Feb 7th, 2008, 20:34

My opinion on this is NO. There are only so many ways to write XHTML code. If they penalized for duplicate code, we'd all be in trouble.

saltedm8 · Feb 7th, 2008, 20:51

as far as i am aware, search engines can only read your code and content, 100% true, everyone knows that.

it can tell if your site validates, 100% true, everyone knows that.

ok, lets go back to basic web design, lets say the doctype, it is a statement, yes ? - just like a piece of code - its a statement ( or in programming world, a command )

lets take meta

meta = read me and issue these as tags / descriptions etc

code = read me and check me

as far as i am aware there is not a single mention of 'compare against other websites' - would be too complicated to code, even for google because it would mean finding code that was alike and penalising that, -

unfortunately, code always outputs as html, which obviously has limited use, unlike php, - what we can not read, bots can not read, so by that conclusion, the only way to achieve a compare rule would be to literally hunt each cms, forum, blog etc and compare them, an easy job for a bot -

but the flaw comes from the templating, each template has its own code, different from the next, maybe even something as simple as a new header, or a different colour font or even something as simple as your content text ( this would also be applied on the website owners site too, not just the template to download ) - it would take an immense amount of memory and power to take every one and compare it before indexing

conclusion
too many variables, would it really be worth the hassle ? i don't think so, content is more important than code, but its great if your code validates ( from a bots point of view )

thats how i look at it

Quote:

Originally Posted by alexgeek

I think Mike's going to disagree with you there

obviously there is allot more that is checked, but when it comes to the coding as a whole, that is it

MikeHopley · Feb 7th, 2008, 21:17

Quote:

as far as i am aware, search engines can only read your code and content, 100% true, everyone knows that.

it can tell if your site validates, 100% true, everyone knows that.

So you think Googlebot validates HTML as it runs?

Quote:

100% true, everyone knows that.

In the long and bloated history of rhetoric, has this phrase ever been used aptly?

aso186 · Feb 7th, 2008, 23:34

When people refer to 'duplicate content', they are discussing just that - content.

Google doesn't care for duplicate code, that would be ludicrous! It doesn't index your div's or your li's, only what's between the tags i.e. the 'visible' content.

TALLMALEUK · Feb 7th, 2008, 23:39

Hi aso186,

Thanks for that. That does make sense but im new to all of this and i have heard that search engine like google penalise unoriginal duplicated source code that exists in the off the shelf website software packages but perhaps this person who told me was wrong or misunderstood themselves.

One more question for everyone here. Someone also pointed out to me that with all of the off the shelf website dating packages that you hardly ever find any with over a thousand members? Is this true? Or has there been any great success stories in terms of membership of websites built using off the shelf dating website software?

Many thanks

Lchad · Feb 8th, 2008, 11:02

I have no experience with dating services. But it's possible to visit some online services and see if at the bottom of their forum, they state how many members they have.

TALLMALEUK · Feb 9th, 2008, 01:21

Hi Lchad,

I have actually done that looked into dating websites claiming to use dating website software and have never seen any of these websites with more than about 1,000 members. And since i also heard that search engines like google penalise non original source code websites then i put two and two together and thought maybe this is why these websites never really get any bigger.

Many thanks

spinal007 · Feb 9th, 2008, 11:09

Search engines penalize for duplicate content. Search engines don't care about code. You will never be penalized for having erroneous code.

HOWEVER, bad code makes it harder for spiders to crawl your website properly. When a spider hits a few errors, it gives up and comes back some other timer. If the errors continue, the spider takes longer and longer to visit your site. This can affect your rankings, but it's not a direct penalty as such, it's just the ultimate effect of having bad code.

TALLMALEUK · Feb 17th, 2008, 23:41

Thanks Spinal007 and everyone for their help and contributions with this subject.

onlineseo · Feb 25th, 2008, 19:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by TALLMALEUK

Hi everyone,

Can anyone tell me if the search engines penalise unoriginal source coded websites like the of the shelf dating website software packages like Emeeting and Boonex etc which are sold to lots of people and used to start websites? Because i heard that search engines like google for instance penalise these types of website because they do not use original source code.

Many thanks

This is not true. Take for example several wordpress and phpbb forums are scoring high rankings on search engines.

Search engines do not pay heed to programming aspect, but surely it sees whether website is HTML friendly or not.

Along with this it will see whether content is easily crawlable, and other stuff. Other than that I dont see any reason why google would take into account programming of website