Google Debunks The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth (Part 2)
By Anna Johnson on September 30th, 2008Yesterday, we debunked the duplicate content penalty myth. However, it would be wrong to suggest that duplicate content is completely harmless.
Why? For two main reasons…
Firstly, Google DOES penalize those who blatantly scrape content from other websites:
“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,” writes Ms Moskwa.
Secondly, Google may not PENALIZE… but it may equally not INDEX duplicate pages on your website. For example, if you have two landing pages that are the same (e.g. because you are running some kind of landing page test), Google will tend to index one and not the other. This also applies if you have multiple URLs on the same domain pointing to the same content.
But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Google and the other search engines are aiming to give search engine users relevant results based on their search query. If one result doesn’t happen to satisfy a searcher, then there should be lots of other – different – results to select from. How helpful would it be if Google’s index was full of the same pages? Not very.
Equally, you will often find that, over time, Google begins weeding out the results for many of those duplicate articles on the Internet. Again, it’s not to ‘penalize’ anyone – it’s to deliver relevant, distinguishable results to search engine users.
Okay, so that’s the duplicate content penalty myth out of the way. What’s the other myth that bugs me? I’ll leave that for a later issue…
