Yesterday, 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…

Source: Susan Moskwa, “Demystifying the ‘duplicate content penalty’”, The Official Google Blog, September 12, 2008

There are at least two myths circulating in the Internet marketing and search engine optimization communities that frustrate me no end. They frustrate me for two chief reasons:

1. These myths cause real DAMAGE to people’s businesses by inciting them to devote time, resources and money to the WRONG things; and
2. They allow wannabe experts to continue selling their B.S. at others’ expense.

The first myth is the ‘duplicate content penalty’ myth - the idea that the search engines will ‘penalize’ you e.g. remove your site from the index or lower your ranking - if you publish the same content more than once on the Internet.

This is JUST NOT TRUE.

There are sooo many examples of duplicate content being routinely indexed by the search engines. Just do a search on the title of an article syndicated by Reuters or the Associated Press. Up will come results for the same article on lots of different news sites.

Let’s face it. If the search engines de-indexed sites for publishing the same articles… there would be NO news sites listed in the search engines at all!

And that’s just one example.

But if you don’t believe me when I say the duplicate content penalty is a myth, hear it from the horse’s mouth. This is what Susan Moskwa said in a recent post to the Official Google Blog:

“There’s no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.”

Couldn’t be clearer than that.

Okay, so why do concerns about publishing duplicate content - either on your own site or on others’ sites – persist? Two reasons.

Source: Susan Moskwa, “Demystifying the ‘duplicate content penalty’”, The Official Google Blog, September 12, 2008