There Is No Duplicate Content Penalty

[djbaxter]

There Is No Duplicate Content Penalty
March 24, 2010
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.

Read full article...

 

[bigcat1967]

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.

Maybe I'm not reading this correctly - but as mentioned above - sure, SEs won't have a problem with this...however, I would think the writer of the article(s) would have a problem and this would cause a copyright issue. Maybe I'm off base here?

 

[djbaxter]

I believe Jill is talking about articles from article directories and the like where there is already permission to reproduce the article.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Also see this informative 16 page 5 Star forum post:

<a href="http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5staraffiliateprograms.com/search-engine-marketing-seo-forum/7275-duplicate-content-s-not-what-you-think.html#post21780">Duplicate Content: It?s Not What You Think!</a>

 

[flammableeye]

Maybe I'm not reading this correctly - but as mentioned above - sure, SEs won't have a problem with this...however, I would think the writer of the article(s) would have a problem and this would cause a copyright issue. Maybe I'm off base here?

You could be submitting articles or quoting things or even added synopsis' for movies, books, games..etc There are a lot of things which can be duplicated without intent to duplicate and without copyright. This will be a sigh of relief for a lot of people

 

[Kalan]

I don?t know if there is a penalty, but I think Google is not interested in having the same content more than once. Why should they? If duplicate content is still ranking it could be because Google?s software cannot do better. But this could change in the future.

 

[alicerippin]

I agree with this completely. I have 4 websites all using exactly the same database, with all the same posts and design and they all rank very well in google.

 

[yanamk]

Well, that is definitely a relief!! There has been so much fear regarding this issue, especially for those affiliates involved in article marketing or have similar content sites. Thanks for spreading the word!

 

[katej]

I agree with this. I've seen lots of duplicate contents that are ranking well, but still I'm afraid to do that to my own sites. Maybe I should give it a try. It will save me hours of writing original articles.

 

[angelinalove]

Its a new thing for me and shocking too by hearing that there is no duplicate content penalty, as i believe google always accepts a fresh and unique content for your article directories if you submit in those. But now i need to read this whole article for what actually is about.

 

[BrianSisko]

I've read on other SEO forums that it's best to post it on your main site and have it indexed there first before submitting elsewhere. Presumably this is so that if there is a penalty it will be on the other site and not yours and also your site gets more credit for having original content? Not sure if it's true or not, but it does kinda make sense.

 

[moneybloger]

WOW This is great to know about. I have wondered about this issue. My experiance has mostly been with selling products on line.
I often copy exactly what is on my product manufacturer's home page and post it directly into my pages. I know I havn't been penalized 'cause some of my pages are in the 1st and 2nd possisions on serps. What I do, is try to change things sometimes so I can add verbage and make it longer, believing that the more content the better for page rank??

I'll be less concerned now about article writing tho.

 

[janellelk]

I really strongly believe there is penalty for duplicate content. My boss has us following that rule of thumb and also implementing a diversity of backlinking, etc.

 

[djbaxter]

I really strongly believe there is penalty for duplicate content. My boss has us following that rule of thumb and also implementing a diversity of backlinking, etc.

Be that as it may, Google has made it abundantly clear that there is no such penalty.