The Duplicate Content Myth

Ok, my headline might be a little overboard – duplicate content CAN negatively affect you, but I’ve always argued it’s not as great a penalty as many think. I know too many SEOer’s who obsess about duplicate content when they should spend their time on other high-priority factors. Google knows that most duplicate content is unintentional and sometimes unavoidable. If Google took a strict line against duplicate content many large, heavily trafficked sites would find themselves penalized for legitimate, non-spammy content. Where you want to be careful with duplicate content is when you have content on multiple domains and Google doesn’t know which to index and rank first. This is why you should pay attention to pesky site scrapers and take action against the site and their host if it becomes a problem.

Why am I so confident that duplicate content is not as big an issue as many make it out to be? Because Eric Enge of StoneTemple Consulting just published an interview with Google’s search evangelist Adam Lasnik. In the interview Adam states unequivocally that duplicate content is not heavily policed for the reasons stated above. Again, the problem is only when Google can’t differentiate which content is original when it encounters duplicate content on multiple domains.

So if you obsess about duplicate content cool your heals and read Eric’s interview here. I’ve also posted the meat of what Adam has to say about duplicate content below, but many other topics are discussed and I suggest reading the full interview.

“The most important thing to realize about duplicate content is that duplicate content in and of itself is not a horrible thing. We realize that there are many cases in which content is duplicated inadvertently, or for other valid reasons. In the vast majority of cases duplicate content is something that is done innocently. It is actually a rare occurrence that we see people engaging in practices that create duplicate content for the express purpose of manipulating their rankings. The real problem with duplicate content, is that it creates the conundrum “which page do we show in our index”. And, unfortunately sometimes that ends up not being the page that the webmaster wants us to show”

“……. in the context of duplicate content, penalties tend to be relatively rare. In the majority of cases it is innocent and unintentional. But, in cases where it’s very extreme, there can be penalties applied. It comes back to what I mentioned earlier which is whether or not the duplicate content passes the smell test. It’s very much related to issues of quality as well. If the degree of content duplication is such that it impairs the user’s experience, it can indicate a site that is generally of low quality. In that case that site probably isn’t going to do very well in our index.”

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