Great to see Google’s Matt Cutts formally confirming what many have us have assumed all along – that making a website available over both IPv6 and IPv4 would not bring about a “duplicate content” issue that would incur penalties in search engine ranking. The question Matt answers is:
As we are now closer than ever to switching to IPv6, could you please share info on how Google will evaluate websites. One website being in IPv4, exactly the same one in IPv6 – isn’t it considered duplicate content?
Here’s Matt’s response saying that there won’t be an issue:
If this was a reason you were hearing for NOT moving to IPv6, consider it addressed… why not get started today with making your sites available over IPv6? We’ve got a number of IPv6 resources available for you, including these:
- Tutorial: Making Content Available Over IP
- Video: How To IPv6-Enable ANY Website Using A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
and many more! (And if you can’t find what you need, please let us know! We’re here to help you make the move to IPv6!)
UPDATE 11 Jul 2014 – As Marco Davids notes in the comments, Matt Cutts mis-spoke in the video at about the 0:19 minute mark. He said that an IPv6 address has “six identifiers” in comparison to IPv4’s four digital octets. In fact a full IPv6 address has eight separate hexadecimal address blocks. We’ll assume that may Matt just jumped from the fact that IPv4 has 4 segments to naturally IPv6 should have 6, right? 🙂
If you’d like more info about IPv6 addressing, please see our IPv6 address planning section.