Is There A Duplicate Content Penalty?
September 12, 2009 | No Comments »
Virtually every presentation I sit through on the topic of Internet marketing mentions the duplicate content penalty, often claiming that having other sites scrape content from your site will adversely impact your Google rankings. A typical expression of this penalty is:
Duplicate Content Penalty – How to Lose Google Ranking Fast
Duplicate content penalty. Ever heard of it? This penalty is applied by Google and possibly other search engines when content found on your website is largely the same as what is found elsewhere on your site or on other websites across the internet.
Here is what Google’s webmaster tools help site has to say:
Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.
And from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog:
Before diving in, I’d like to briefly touch on a concern webmasters often voice: in most cases a webmaster has no influence on third parties that scrape and redistribute content without the webmaster’s consent. We realize that this is not the fault of the affected webmaster, which in turn means that identical content showing up on several sites in itself is not inherently regarded as a violation of our webmaster guidelines. This simply leads to further processes with the intent of determining the original source of the content—something Google is quite good at, as in most cases the original content can be correctly identified, resulting in no negative effects for the site that originated the content.
Finally, also from the Webmaster Central Blog:
Duplicate content. There’s just something about it. We keep writing about it, and people keep asking about it. In particular, I still hear a lot of webmasters worrying about whether they may have a “duplicate content penalty.”
Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.
(Emphasis mine.)
So, you really don’t have to worry about duplicate content, and if you write or speak on this subject, please stop scaring people.
