There Is No Duplicate Content Penalty

There Is No Duplicate Content Penalty
By Jill Whalen

The SEO industry has been plagued for years by a lack of
consistency with SEO terms and definitions. One of the most
prevalent inaccurate terms we hear is "duplicate content
penalty." While duplicate content is not something you should
strive for on your website, there's no search engine penalty
for having it.

Duplicate content has been and always will be a natural part of
the Web. It's nothing to be afraid of. If your site has some
dupe content for whatever reason, you don't have to lose sleep
every night worrying about the wrath of the Google gods.
They're not going to shoot lightning bolts at your site from
the sky, nor are they going to banish your entire website from
ever showing up for relevant searches.

They are simply going to filter out the dupes.

The search engines want to index and show to their users (the
searchers) as much unique content as algorithmically possible.
That's their job, and they do it quite well considering what
they have to work with: spammers using invisible or irrelevant
content, technically challenged websites that crawlers can't
easily find, copycat scraper sites that exist only to obtain
AdSense clicks, and a whole host of other such nonsense.

There's no doubt that duplicate content is a problem for search
engines. If a searcher is looking for a particular type of
product or service and is presented with pages and pages of
results that provide the same basic information, then the engine
has failed to do its job properly. In order to supply users with
a variety of information on their search query, search engines
have created duplicate content "filters" (not penalties) that
attempt to weed out the information they already know about.
Certainly, if your page is one of those that is filtered, it may
very well feel like a penalty to you, but it's not - it's a
filter.

Penalties Are for Spammers

Search engine penalties are reserved for pages and sites that
are purposely trying to trick the search engines in one form or
another. Penalties can be meted out algorithmically when obvious
deceptions exist on a page, or they can be personally handed out
by a search engineer who discovers the hanky-panky through spam
reports and other means. To many people's surprise, penalties
rarely happen to the average website. Sites that receive a true
penalty typically know exactly what they did to deserve it. If
they don't, they haven't been paying attention.

Honestly, the search engines are not out to get you. If you have
a page on your site that sells red hats and another very similar
page selling blue hats, you aren't going to find your site
banished off the face of Google. The worst thing that will
happen is that only the red hat page may show up in the search
results instead of both pages showing up. If you need both to
show up in the search engines, then you'll need to make them
substantially unique.

Suffice it to say that just about any content that is easily
created without much human intervention (i.e., automated) is not
a great candidate for organic SEO purposes.

Article Reprints

Another duplicate-content issue that many are concerned about is
the republishing of online articles. Reprinting someone's
article on your site is not going to cause a penalty. While you
probably don't want every article on your site to be a reprint
of someone else's, if the reprints are helpful to your site
visitors and your overall mission, then it's not a problem for
the search engines.

If your own bylined articles are getting published elsewhere,
that's a good thing. You don't need to provide a different
version to other sites or not allow them to be republished at
all. The more sites that host your article, the more chances you
have to build your credibility as well as to gain links back to
your site through a short bio at the end of the article. In many
cases, Google doesn't even filter out duplicate articles in
searches, but even if they eventually show only one version,
it's still okay.

Inadvertent Multiple URLs for the Same Content

Where duplicate content CAN be a problem is when a website shows
essentially the same page, but on numerous URLs. WordPress blogs
often fall victim to this when multiple tags or categories are
chosen to label any one blog post. The blog software then
creates numerous URLs for the same article, depending on which
category or tag a user clicked to view it. While this type of
duplicate content won't cause a search engine penalty, it will
often split the overall link popularity of the article, which is
not recommended.

Any backend system or CMS that creates numerous URLs for any one
piece of content can indeed be a problem for search engines,
because it makes their spiders do more work. It's silly to have
the spider finding the same information over and over again,
when you'd rather have it finding other, unique information to
index. This type of unintended duplicate content should
definitely be cleaned up either through 301-redirects or by
using the canonical link element (rel=canonical)
[http://www.highrankings.com//canonical-link-element].

When it comes to duplicate content, the search engines are not
penalizing you or thinking that you're a spammer; they're
simply trying to show some variety in their search results pages
and don't want to waste time indexing content they already have
in their databases.
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Jill Whalen, CEO  of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has
been performing SEO services (http://www.highrankings.com/seo-services)
since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor
newsletter (http://www.highrankings.com/newsletter/) and the
High Rankings SEO forum.
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