Duplicate Content Penalty

The Google Webmaster Blog clears up the duplicate content penalty myth once and for all. I have tried to explain this so often I feel like a broken record. The fear of duplicate content penalties have been rampant on the web with many so-called seo gurus blogging about it and giving bad advice when it comes to duplicate content penalties.

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.

There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you’re scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines

But most site owners whom I hear worrying about duplicate content aren’t talking about scraping or domain farms; they’re talking about things like having multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content. Like www.example.com/skates.asp?color=black&brand=riedell and www.example.com/skates.asp?brand=riedell&color=black. Having this type of duplicate content on your site can potentially affect your site’s performance, but it doesn’t cause penalties.

To summarize this; There is NO DUPLICATE CONTENT PENALTY. Duplicate content in your website may mean that the duplicates are not indexed. This is not a penalty. Google will rank one of the pages and not the others because they have the same content. Common sense on Google’s part.

Scaping someone else’s content may get you a penalty and it should get you a penalty 100% of the time. But aty the very least, scraping someone else’s content will not get you ranked in search engines. So if you are scraping someone else’s content, you are not only a thief, you are a stupid thief.

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