MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

“There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty!” This has has been said over and over again by people in the industry that really should know better. This silly statement is a fallacy; duplicate content is harmful and even if it is not penalised as per say, it’s just as bad.

As Enge mentions in his post, duplicate content does not help the user. If Google presents the same article consecutively in its SERPS, how would that benefit the searcher? It doesn’t, as it is irrelevant. That’s why Search engines apply a filter to prevent this from happening.

In essence, when the bots come to a website ready to crawl, each duplicate page crawled will be ignored and may result in fewer of your good pages being crawled. So, if your authority pages are right at the bottom, with thousands of duplicate pages above it, you may never get them into the index.

If you then go and distribute that authority content to third parties, you may not be credited for that authority content because Google has never seen that page on your site. It could be that Google is, in fact, seeing that content for the first time on someone else`s website .

It’s a waste of money, a waste of links and a waste of time spent in creating versions of the same content. Although rewording your content may save you from being penalised for a short period of time, it may still be harmful in the longer term. If Google sees three similar pages, it will disregard two of the pages, and may not show the page that you want it to show the most.

Even though you are not being “penalised” by Google, it will certainly be hurtful to your website. You cannot control what the Search Engines will do; algorithms change too regularly to take such a risk. If you own a website selling work wear and have several product pages, as well as print versions of those product pages saved as PDFs, Google may end up showing the PDFs instead of the main product page in the website that you want it to show. The only solution here is to add nofollow and noindex links to the print pages. This is controversial in itself, as Copland mentions that this may make the link seem worthless in Google’s eyes, which suggests that it’s a pointless route to take.

Another point Enge makes in his article is that Google could come down on you for Dup Content by removing your content from the SERPS if the content appears on third party websites. They will then favouring the republished content. The only solution there is to ensure that the third party links back to that original source page on your website, which is not easy to control.

At the end of the day, the key is to keep your content unique and create as much of your own content as possible. With hard work and determination, this will lead to the best results. It’s definitely worth it in the end. You can still be hurt by duplicate content in a way that is not considered a “penalty”. Duplicate content is never a good idea, so simply put, just don’t do it!