Last week we broke the news that Google does some form of deduplication of the top stories and web results in some situations. John Shehata released some data from his Newzdash product showing that 67% of all Google searches have duplicate top stories to web result URLs and about 12% of top stories URLs get duplicated in the web search results.
Here is when Google deduplicates the top stories and web results, note, Danny Sullivan of Google said this might change. Google will deduplicate a URL from web results if a link appears as the first link in top stories and if the top stories box appears before web results. However, if it comes after, Google won’t deduplicate the URL.
Here is the chart from Newzdash:
John Shehata added “top stories positions 6 and 7 are the most duplicated in web search results in positions 4 and 5. John added that the “numbers are very steady over the past 30 days and he looked at 5.1MM URLs in 15 countries.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
