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I just had a question closed as a duplicate. I agree that it's a duplicate, but I think that search engine users would not find the original (as I didn't).

Is a question closed as a duplicate still indexed for search engines? If not, should I edit the original to make it more searchable?

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2  
How did you search - Google or the site search? If it's the latter I'm not surprised you didn't find it. Also having many search terms pointing to the answer is a good thing. – ChrisF Feb 3 '12 at 13:05
2  
Well, yes. That's the whole point of leaving the duplicate hanging around. If they weren't indexed we'd just delete them. See also: blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/… – Al E. Feb 3 '12 at 14:07
up vote 2 down vote accepted

The answer is yes, try it out for yourself: search Google for

Why can I assign an undefined variable to itself in Ruby and get nil

and you'll find the top result (right now) is: Template example in C++

(I just picked a random, old, duplicate-closed question and took a unique-enough looking string from it.)

Try it with the first sentence in your question and it should work too.

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