Duplicate Content Myth Busted By Google
Duplicate content penalties by Google is one of the most argued subjects in online world and also perhaps one of the most misunderstood.
I want to share today and article I just read and I think you can benefit from greatly as it dissects information coming directly from Google Search Quality team on duplicate content, penalties, etc:
Google Busts the Duplicate Content Myth
Greg begins by clearing up a popular myth about duplicate content, and that is that Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content. This is not the case. That’s not to say that duplicate content can’t have a negative impact on your rankings, but Google itself is not penalizing you for it. Read More Here
Also pay attention to the comments for some superb info, some of it might explain why I always take legal action against those who steal my content.
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Glad you frought the Duplicate Content issue to light, Alex – and thanks for sharing this informative article. It’s a question I deal with regularly in my PLR sales, and as you know it should almost never be an issue…
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I hear you Doug, been in same boat for quite a bit and glad someone who has “perceived authority” in the field comes out with solid explanation.
Remember the strange plagiarized comment I was blogging about last week? Since I took that one comment out, my URL went up from page 20 to top five on page 1 – in just four days!
So I don’t think its a penalty in the sense that penalties can overlap and extend beyond the page in question, but Google definitely knows how to put copied content at a low priority in the search results.
(BTW: The headline link inside your quote section is bringing up an error!)
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Thanks John,
Thanks for sharing – I agree they can penalize – I think this article more goes into the “Duplicate Content” issue
I absolutely agree on copied content and that is why I always take action when someone steals mine.
Hmm, so how do you approach legal action? Do you go straight to the hosting provider and is that usually enough to fix the issue? I usually tend to ignore it when someone is copying my stuff, but I do try to add a few extra bookmarks to my original page and keep an eye on whether or not I’m outranking the copier.
John,
I hit hosting and if AdSense used, which 99.9% of them do – use Google Copyright infringement report process. If not removed on second complain – person looses AdSense account, and that one is irreversible. Works like a charm – I hate freaking content scrapers almost as much as I hate spammers
Duplicate content penalty is just another SEO myth, maybe the most misunderstood of all. It was never a penalty, but a filter.
Though Google does a pretty bad job at filtering duplicate content..
raphael´s last blog ..Secrets Of Tonality To Improve Your Hypnosis Skills
Exactly my point Raphael, unfortunately too many people “heard” something on topic and then shared it as gospel and started the stupid rumor, or what is even worth – did it in order to get some personal gains
While you may not get directly penalized by Google, there are a number of other serious issues to be concerned about. For one, content theft is a major issue and in many cases, Google still has a hard time figuring out who the original author was and ranks content thieves higher.
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Brian,
When you content is stolen – don’t leave it to Google to figure it out – attack!
I hate content scrapers with all my passion and always take legal action and can proudly say that I was responsible for at least 3 idiots losing their AdSense accounts.
Theft is a theft! Period.
I got right information in right time. Thanks Alex for sharing.
But yet I have to do a research on duplicate content issue. I still don’t know what will happen if content from a PR0 website is stolen and published on a PR8 website? Once I read that in that case low PR website will suffer for duplicate content.
Lets assume that original article contain a backlink and copied article has modified backlink to a different website. Now which link Google will value? The link present on original article or the link on PR8 website?
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While I agree with what Raphael states below – I think if you actually file the papers for copyright infringement (DMCA Note), which is provided by Google – you can can succeed in removing content from that site.
Contacting hosting account and filing same DMCA note to them also works quite nicely, unless its located in some god forgotten country.
@chandan: if that happens, you don’t wanna be the site with lower trust..no matter how old your page/content was there. It will be pushed down and I saw that many times. Google says they can deal with this situation, but they can’t actually. Is just a matter of domain trust!
raphael´s last blog ..Secrets Of Tonality To Improve Your Hypnosis Skills
Thanks raphael for clearing my doubt. I learned a good point. Thanks Alex too for your suggestion.
Chandan´s last blog ..Top 5 Reasons – Why You Have Not Made Your First Dollar Online Till Now?
You’re welcome Chandan
That’s why is important to check traffic stats periodically. If you notice an important drop or a specific page gets less traffic, see if your page was copied somewhere else. Also use the alerts from Google with your domain name and/or website name.
I also checked your blog and spent some time reading your posts. Nice tips you got there, will visit again in the future.
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Much of the Internet is based on a duplicate content model. If Google really penalized it, EZA and other places that syndicate content would be out of business.
I think Google does make some effort to try and present a variety of results, rather than the same content in the Top 10. However, I know several keywords where essentially the same info is at 1, 3 and 7 or something like that.
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Some websites I visit have duplicated content. Does this mean that google can mark this as a bad website? Sorry for the question, noobie here on internet marketing
No it doesn’t. People simply can see those pages as less important. Remember – Google ranks pages not sites, although if too many pages ranked low it will impact overall blog ranking
Hi All,
Although i have heard a lot about websites penalized by search engines but i have not experienced it yet. But one thing is for sure that fresh content keeps you ahead on search engines always. So it is better to work hard for fresh content always.
Nice Post.
What about articles that have been spun? While they won’t be exact duplicates, there will probably still be substantial similarities. Assuming all the articles have links pointing back to the same site, will that site actually get any link love?
I use a lot of duplicate content as the basis for my site but by ADDING relevant extra, keyword rich text, I find that Google keeps sending me quite a bit of traffic (about 20,000 in 9 months, each averaging about 4-5 pages viewed).
I’m a month away from starting Article Marketing, so it should be interesting to see how pointing links to pages increases that traffic – even though the page is duplicate content.
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The best reply so far below! Please read the following from the page that this post links to… and I couldn’t agree more with what this person said – I think he’s bang on!…
Google’s Myth
The only myth here is the one that Google engineers continue to propagate. There is a serious flaw in Google’s algorithm. It tends to hit small content-focused sites the hardest. Every few months, the Google engineers come creeping out of their offices to debunk the myth that duplicate content won’t hurt you, but read between the lines. They are trying to explain it away by playing games with semantics.
Content theft is a very rampant problem. It is a fact of life on the internet, and there isn’t much that anyone can do about it. There just are too many unpoliced havens where content can be republished. This would be easier to ignore if Google handled stolen content correctly. That is, they should not promote the stolen content, and they should not allow sites that are composed of stolen content to make money from AdSense. Nor should they allow them to exist on Blogspot. Believe me, there are a lot of these types of sites, and Google looks the other way. In other words, they contribute to the “cesspool.”
Google should investigate these issues with the same force with which they address paid links. If someone reports a site that has stolen content, they should look at the issue and take steps to resolve it. Often, it is very easy to see who the originating site is.
The bottom line is that if someone steals something I published, my original article should not be filtered out of ANY search results. It should rank in EXACTLY the same place that it ranked before it was stolen.
This, however, is not what happens. Google routinely tosses out the original article and replaces it with the newer, fresher duplicate. Here is what is worse. If a lot of your content is stolen over a short period of time, Google will kill your entire site. It will filter every page, whether its content was copied or not. This is a PENALTY. It is a DUPLICATE CONTENT PENALTY. It exists. I know. I face it every few months, and the only way to get my site back to where it belongs is to spend hours and hours and hours filing DMCA complaints to get the damaging duplicates removed.
By the way, neither Microsoft nor Yahoo have ever had this problem, at least not to the extreme severity that Google does. It’s Google’s big Achilles’ heel, which is why they keep coming out of the woodwork to try to convince people that this problem doesn’t exist. It has existed for years, and nothing has changed.
Mark,
Thank you for extended reply.
While I have not experienced it to the extent you describe – I myself always take action when content is stolen and not due to “duplicate content” but due to my work been used some stealing SOB. And I do file DMCA but never had to deal with hours of work for it.
While I don’t doubt your word – it does sound extreme and I would personally be interested to learn what type of content is gets stolen to that extreme, as I have seen some blogs by first rate copywriters who didn’t suffer from problem you describe. My own blog is fairly active and visited as well and requires an action once in a while but once again – extremes you describe is not something I have seen or can confirm.
Perhaps you are an exception?
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my lengthy post Alex, I really appreciate it! However, that wasn’t me I was describing, but it came from the website this your initial post linked to.
What the guy said, interested me greatly, that is why I copied and pasted (whooops, I may have stolen his material
) ,but I wanted others to read what ‘could’ happen, in extreme cases, that’s all.
But no, that wasn’t me who experienced this, thank God!
Hey Mark!
Thanks, I missed it
I thought it looked familiar but failed to check the source site – I still stand on my statement. Extreme described there I think is extremely rare and I personally never seen it.
glad I found this site before I put up my first blog
I will bookmark this info so that I can have it just
in cast I have a problem like this
I must disagree with what Alex said before. Google won’t rank a newer, fresh page above an old page, on a more trusted domain. It will filter out the page with less PR/authority. It works like that. Fresh content might be pushed on top but only for a very short period but I didn’t see that happening. Maybe it happens but is not like that, in most of the cases.
raphael´s last blog ..Boosting the Hypnosis Performance with Improved Tonality
hey Raphael,
Not sure where I said what you disagree with
but I agree with you! LOL
I had heard some stuff about this, so the conclusion is that google will only show the more relevant result?, meaning that maybe low pr sites could lose their position even having the original content.? … ok
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Google does what Google wants and what makes it money – we can only try to play by their rules to benefit from traffic they provide. I don’t know if they will present more relevant stuff or not
I worried about duplicate content issue in the beginning but now now. All In One SEO plug-in takes care of things nicely.
Google simply picks one post out of identical posts and leaves the other behind off it’s index.
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Personally, I don’t care as much about the penalizing of the duplicate content, I hate HATE people that steal my content because it took time for me to actually write it. How dare they.
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Stealing other peoples content is just lazy and wrong, But i think it would be to difficult for google to control.
Clickbank Stealth
The power of Google lies on his secret algorithm because It keeps us testing and trying. I have seen this penalty of Duplicate Content thousands of times especially within the same website. But isn’t a summary of the same post duplicated in the homepage, category page and tag pages???
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Duplicate content posted to different platforms looks different due to the coding of each different platform…No?
James, I agree and I think duplicate content thingy is way over-hyped by someone who needed to push some product that “solved the problem”