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Duplicate Content Penalty Explained
By Find2k | September 16, 2008
In many SEO Presentations we have taken, this is the same question which is asked by the publishers that as they provide content from feeds.. is it possible that their website would be penalized by Google or other search engines?
Well, our example use to be this:
“If you give the credits to the feeds provider and add your own touch in the article (i.e. images, videos, links, etc.) than you will be providing more information to the user and you will not be penalized by Google anyhow for the feeds”.
Well… that was our reply and here is what Google have cleared again in their Google Blog post about Duplicate Content Penalty.
There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you’re scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines:
- Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
- Avoid… “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
- If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first
OK. so now here the general question asked is, if Google finds links with duplicate content of some extent how they rank the pages on SERP (Search Engine Ranking Positions), here’s the answer:
Most search engines strive for a certain level of variety; they want to show you ten different results on a search results page, not ten different URL s that all have the same content. To this end, Google tries to filter out duplicate documents so that users experience less redundancy. You can find details in this blog post, which states:
- When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URL’s into one cluster.
- We select what we think is the “best” URL to represent the cluster in search results.
- We then consolidate properties of the URL’s in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.
In most cases Google does a good job of handling this type of duplication. However, you may also want to consider content that’s being duplicated across domains. In particular, deciding to build a site whose purpose inherently involves content duplication is something you should think twice about if your business model is going to rely on search traffic, unless you can add a lot of additional value for users.
So the thing which we need to understand is that Google’s objective is to provide relevant information to the user and get ranked on search engines for better user experience. So if you want your site to be up in rankings, go ahead and add some relevant information for the users, so that search engines can find you useful for their customers.
At the end I will paste the Google Summary 
In summary: Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you’ve been duplicating deliberately, it’s unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty. This means that:
- You typically don’t need to submit a reconsideration request when you’re cleaning up innocently duplicated content.
- If you’re a webmaster of beginner-to-intermediate savviness, you probably don’t need to put too much energy into worrying about duplicate content, since most search engines have ways of handling it.
- You can help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties! The remedies for duplicate content are entirely within your control. Here are some good places to start.
So keep writing and adding good and relevant content and always remember “Content is King”
Topics: Google, Internet Marketing, New Updates on Google, Search Marketing |