The Real Duplicate Content Penalty – Google reveals the truth about Duplicate Content

The Real Duplicate Content PenaltyDuplicate content issues are something we've been paying a lot of attention to recently with our clients' sites, just as it has been flexing a great many other SEO's minds. A number of SEO companies have been pedalling the Duplicate Content Penalty as the latest hot item to sell to clients and prospective clients, promising ingenious solutions to the issue that has been causing their websites so much grief and drop in their rankings.

Firstly, what is duplicate content? Google describes it simply as "substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar". In other words pages which are identical or, at least, very, very similar.

Secondly, why is it such an issue? Spammers (website owners/masters who try to artificially manipulate search results via 'black hat' methods) have used the copying of pages and sites as a quick way to boost their rankings, after all you can soon create a website if you copy all the content from someone else. Similarly, some people have tried to achieve manipulation of search results by presenting their site across a number of different domains so that they have more than one bite of the search cherry.  This is obviously bad, and has led to the rise of the "Google Duplicate Content Penalty" myth, where people have believed that Google penalises, even removes sites and pages from its index which 'suffer' from Duplicate Content.

Google has stated through various sources and on a number of occasions, that no such penalty exists, it simply wishes to provide its users (the searcher) with the most relevant results and it does not wish to provide multiple links to what is, basically, the same content.  We have largely believed this, feeling that the main damage that duplicate content inflicts is through incorrect indexing, i.e. Google indexing your non-preferred URL's and through page rank dilution, i.e. if you have internal and external links to multiple variants of the same pages, your page rank is potentially diluted across however many variants, which is what we have sought to address with our SEO Cients.

Now in a post on Google's Official Webmaster Blog, Google has categorically denied that a Duplicate Content Penalty exists, stating that whereas they do penalise spammers and spammers who use Duplicate Content, "Spammers also use Bold tags" but they don't penalise everyone who uses them.

Google realise that not all duplicate content is malicious. They point to real examples of multiple versions of a home page, e.g.

This is something that we have found on most of our client sites (and fixed), Google points out that it even occurs on the Queen's website !

When you add in that some people also have .com and .net, etc., versions of their site, can you see the potential issues? In addition to which URL should Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., select, which URL do other webmasters use when they link to your site? As well as the issue of different urls being selected by the search engine, if links are split potentially 8, 16, 24, etc., times the value of these links in your page rank is diluted accordingly.

There are also issues relating to the breadcrumb trail of your URL, different size, weight options of the same product, if you are selling online, different country versions of the same language site, e.g. Irish, UK, US and so on.

Added to that we can think of Affiliate versions of pages, inadvertent/innocent cloning of pages, non-approved copying of content and a number of other issues, which all can affect a site/pages particular ranking.

Google re-emphasises the use of permanent "301 redirects" and use of the "rel=canonical" tag as ways to address this, which Zelst has been successfully using for a number of months to deal with these issues.

If you would like to discuss your potential duplicate content issues or want help to address them contact Zelst today.

 

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