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Can Google read text widgets?
By Mike | December 15, 2007
Todays question is:
Can you tell me if Google can read text widgets? If I use a lot of them, and they show up with every page, do those pages get read by google as duplicate content?
Thank you.
Yes Google can and does read what is in the text widget. Let me explain what a text widget is doing.
The widget is adding the content to your sidebar in a dynamic way but the spider sees it and so do you readers the same way as if it was hard coded.
This is the same on any website using php. Php allows you to pull another file into the page when it is displayed and add it to the page as needed. This is usually used for menus and sidebars on any type of website where you want the same piece in all the time (like a header and footer too).
The advantage of this is that you can make changes across the whole website in this piece in one place rather than have to go change each page individually. Change the copyright in the footer (something a lot of us will be doing shortly) and it will change on all the pages from the one file.
This should not be any more of a problem for duplicate content than anything that you hard coded in the side bar.
As always your comments and questions are appreciated.
Mike Paetzold
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December 15th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
I had never even considered that sidebar widgets could be considered duplicate content. I am glad to know that Google does read them, but doesn’t punish us for it. Thanks for the info!