Google Does Not Penalize Duplicate Content

What is duplicate content?

The first question you may be asking is what is duplicate content?  Well duplicate content generally refers to a substantial block of content within or across multiple domains that either completely matches or is appreciably similar.  Most of the time this is not intended to be malicious in origin but there are other times when people are trying to manipulate search engines results so they duplicate content.

So what isn’t duplicate content?

Content that is written in Spanish and also in English will not be considered as duplicate content.  As well if you have the occasional snippets (quotes and otherwise) this will not be considered as duplicate content either.

So why does Google care about duplicate content?

The reason why they care is because they want to provide to their users diverse content if possible.  They want a wide range of information so people get what they are looking for.  If people get duplicate results they will not be satisfied and neither will Google.  So Google tries to make the experience the best it can be for the users who use Google.

What does Google do about duplicate content?

Well there has been a myth for a long period of time going around that Google would completely ban your site and unindex it if you had duplicate content but this is not the case.  In reality what happens usually is the less desired result will fall in the index and not be ranked as highly as the desired results.  In rare cases some duplicate content will be removed from the index but this is the case when the content was made to manipulate Google rankings and deceive the users.  So if you aren’t trying to do this type of thing then having your content published in multiple locations on the internet is fine!

What can you do to proactively address duplicate content issue?

Well here are a few things you can try to have less duplicate content on the net:

• Block appropriately: you can block certain pages from being displayed in Googles index with a robots.txt file.  You can do this for duplicate pages such as a print version of a page that doesn’t need to be in Google’s index
• Be consistent with links: try to be consistent with your internal links. Don’t link to /page/ and /page and /page/index.htm
• Minimize repetition: For instance, instead of putting the copyright on the bottom of all your pages you could put a summary and have a link to the full copyright page
• Avoid publishing blank pages: if you are creating a page and it doesn’t have any content or does not have complete content then don’t publish it till it is finished.  This will help Google bots index only the pages it needs to
• Don’t fret: If there are people that are copying the content of your website you should be fine.  Don’t worry about them affecting the rank of your pages.  It may be annoying but will be highly unlikely to affect the rank of your site in a negative way

Have I used duplicated content?

Short answer. Yes!

I have duplicated a bunch of my content across websites.  Such as posting content in my blog and then publishing it in article directories and forums.  I usually wait a few weeks after I post it in my blog before I post it else where because I would like to get the original post indexed higher then the other pages but I think posting in more than one place is good.  It is good because it drives different types of traffic to your blog.  You do not want to rely on one type of traffic to support you website.  If you do and that one source for one reason or another disappears you will end up losing all of your traffic.

Summary

So to sum this all up.  Google will not penalize you for duplicate content as long as it is not done in a manipulative way that will deceive the users of Google.  It may lower the rank of some pages in the index compared to others but will not ban the pages completely.