You have your Active Rain blog climbing the SERPS, then you start your Active Blog, outside Active Rain blog and then maybe you then send your posts to Facebook or you have a wordpress blog. Some of you then will take your posts that you have written and copy and paste them into your website. You are doing great, then suddenly- you read some blog or some comment in the blogosphere that you are posting Duplicate content and you may get the Google slap, ending up in the dreaded Google sand box.
Some bloggers get so fearful that they may stop blogging on Active Rain. You will also hear people who don't like Active Rain using the duplicate content spin to attack Active Rain bloggers. Well, pay them no mind. Look the other way. Walk on by.
Duplicate content that gets the Google discipline is highly likely not going to be yours. Below you can find all of this information from Matt Cutts of Google- in his own words. So don't take my word for it. You can have it right from the horse's mouth. Matt Cutts talked about duplicate content at the latest SMX Seattle conference.
The kind of duplicate content that Google is concerned with is the spammers that go out and use software to duplicate thousands of sites and then try to manipulate the search engine spiders to pick up their sites in SERPS ( Search Engine Results Pages). This is what happened to Squidoo several years ago. I was very active on Squidoo and my lenses were climbing fast on SERPS when we all were at the mercy of some hackers that got into Squidoo and started spamming the search engines. Now Seth Godin is a pretty famous guy on the internet, the creator of Squidoo, yet even he could not stop the Google slap. There was one guy in South America that produced 1500 Squidoo lenses with some software that were all spam! Matt explains more of what Google looks at for spam in the video I posted below.
When you are writing on your Active Rain blog and then click on the post to your outside blog and then add the same post to your website or your wordpress blog- there is nothing wrong with that. You can even tell the search engines which blog is your 'authority' site. But that is beyond the scope of this post. Let's just say that you do post regularly as stated in the beginning of this paragraph. What Google algorithms will do is to choose one to two spots on the search result page for your content. They will just ignore the others.
So if you are following me; it does not hurt you to post duplicate content, you don't get punished for doing so and you get more chances of Google picking up one blog or another. It is like you have put out the same bait in different locations to attract the spiders to your bait. When the spiders arrive they may choose one bait over the other. Many people get the notion that they are being punished because Google only chooses one or two articles with the same content but that is not a punishment. It is just a matter of bringing back to the searcher the best possible variety of matches.
Matt also states that seldom is Google picking up article submissions to article marketers like Ezine articles because they know that is an article from your blog or website. It is still great to do article marketing for the link value.
The goal of Google is to get smarter and smarter. For instance if you change like 10% of the content in one post or just change your keywords around in another post of the same- Google is now smart enough to catch that little trick that many marketers used. Now they will look at that as duplicate content and count it still as one article.
Happy Blogging!
The next SEO TO THE TOP Webinar begins on January 13, 2010- get your space reserved today, limited spaces for the webinar. Start your new year off right with a great SEO boost to the top.
146 Comments on Duplicate Content- Fact Vs Fiction!
OCT
13
2009
Wow , thank you Katerina. All I have heard is that you should not copy stuff from one place to the next, and it is so difficult to write 3 different posts about one subject when that is the main subject of the day or week or whatever. That makes things so much easier. Great info, as always.
Well I'm glad to see you weighing in on this topic as it has been debated quite a bit recently and there have been many opposing viewpoints. Need to review this again but it's bookmarked.
Hi Katerina - Thank you so much for this post. You are a mindreader....I was recently wondering about this very thing! So....if I write an ActiveRain blog, and have it go to my Outside Blog, and post it to localism....and then I mosey over to Trulia....you're saying I can post the whole thing over there on my Trulia blog and I'm not penalized? Or is it better to only post a portion of my article on Trulia with a link back to my Outside Blog? Or does it matter?
Any insights you can provide would be VERY helpful. Thanks! :)
P. S. And I got your check...thank you....hope to sign up for the January class!
EXCELLENT, simply excellent! I can't TELL you how glad I was to hear him say that! You know, last year we had this discussion and I've been hesitant to post to other sites because of this as it takes so long just to keep up with AR, muchless the other sites! Glad to know this...my website is going to LOVE being active again!
Thank you for the information and the encouragment to keep on blogging and that it is okay to use your own words more than once... yikes... very grateful for you sharing this
Hi Katerina - There's a lot of misinformation out there regarding SEO. We're lucky to have someone in like you in the Rain who really understands this and shares with the community.
good stuff to know. Interestingly, I had a webpage with a topic, that I wrote, and then I thought it would make a good blog post - so I did that. I would NEVER consider that to be something wrong. That wouldn't make any sense at all - so I'm glad my instincts were correct.
Now what's really interesting is that someone reposted my blog post (3 others, actually), and one of the reposts got the Google Juice, not my web page and not even my original blog post. I'm not complaining but that is kind of strange...
Thank You Katrina for the clarification... I was beginning to wonder about some of this DUPLICATE content. I really should get into your next class too..
Excellent information that I'm sure many people are glad to read. I try to post different content on my Activerain and Tomato blogs, for the most part, but occasionally I don't - As far as I can tell, it reallly hasn't made any difference one way or the other. This confirms the reasons why it hasn't.
Thank you, good reminder. I always wonder why there is so many myths about Google when Google itself is providing so much information to clear up things (Google webmaster forum, guidelines and Youtube with Matt...)
Thank you for shedding some light on the question of duplicate content. I think most people want to do the right thing and don't want to jeopordize there ARblog, outside blog or web site. Its hard to know what to do. Thank you for making this information available.
Katerina - This is a great piece, as I just received this email from my web programmers "If you put the exact same information on your multiple domain names, that is considered duplicate content. Often, when there is duplicate content, Google will pick the oldest indexed page and treat it as the "primary" and demote or not list the pages on the other domains. So, putting the same info on more than one domain is probably wasted effort." I did not agree with them, either!
Katerina, this has been a concern of mine and I have asked Brad about it and read other sources, but straight from Matt Cutts - that's the source! Thanks for this informational post. So now I don't need to worry about this!
I often check certain topics on search engines and find that all 3 of my activerain blog, localism blog, and outside blog get posted on the 1st page of Google. That's incredible results.
Thanks for the info, I post to AR and my wordpress blog, I also used to paste the same content into a blogger blog. This is definitely something I'd been concerned about.
Thank you SO MUCH for this post! I actually stopped posting my blogs to other sites for fear of Google slapping my hand. Gotta go...I've got lots of catching up to do posting my blogs....
Thanks for shedding some light on this subject. I had always heard that duplicate content was bad, but did it anyway. I am glad to know I was acutally doing the right thing :)
This is very interesting because a specialist SEO company that deals only in real estate and have worked on my web site very succesfully, told me NOT to post my blogs on my site. Now it seems they are wrong. It can get very difficult to know sometimes who is wrong and who is right. I am glad this is from the horses mouth! Thanks again for superb information.
Thanks for posting this. I am sure there are many other Rainers who have worried, even stopped posting for fear of duplicate content. Hopefully this post liberates us all to post great content.
Thank you. This is the best post I have read here in a long time. I do duplicate blog with changes to the headline, and at the bottom I will post the origin to direct to that. It works like that great double play trio in baseball, from Tinkers, to Evers, to Chance.
Wow!! How great. I was spending way too much time making changes to the same article so it wouldn't be the same. A one click post to different places is just what I need.
Katerina: Thanks for the info. I have often wondered about that and was told ... not to worry about it ... it is okay to post in AR and on my Word Press Blog. It is very comforting to actually hear this from an "authority." Thanks again!
Katerina, You spelled it out simple and to the point. I have always posted a blog article to two or three other places and have never been penalized. In fact usually all three show up on the same page. I think a lot of the trouble within the real estate osphere is those that don't like Activerain for some reason or another - some sour grapes just linger.
Katerina, Thanks for bringing clarity to some of the recent questions regarding the science of SEO. It helps to know the 10 percent rule. Now we won't be making minor changes, when duplicating posts, that have no value with the Google spiders.
Thanks for the great information. This is what make Active Rain a wonderful place to share great information, we really appreciate it. All the best, wishing you continued success.
Katerina, this is excellent news and I appreciate you sharing it as many of my clients who are part of AR with outside blogs and Wordpress, websites, etc are always asking me and wondering if they will be penalized by google and search engines for duplicate content. Bookmarking so that I can use your post as a reference and education tool for my clients. ~Anne Marie
Katerina - I have read so many conflicting articles on this topic. Thank you for clarifying it for me ONCE AND FOR ALL. I can always trust you to give me the real story.
I usually copy and paste my AR blog to my wordpress and blogger blogs...although I am not as diligent about posting on those two because I have so much success using AR!
Thank you for this informative post. I was thinking of this very thing just yesterday while considering re-blogging to my website some information I posted here.
I have to confess that I had advised others against replicating their blogs without a substantial amount of rephrasing until I read Matt Cutts' post on the topic. I have also noticed that often, if I replicate content, Google will simply choose one to index. That gets interesting to see which source Google chooses as authoritative. That in itself interests me with respect to how Google views my different websites. Google seems to always have a little bit of mystery up its sleeve for us all.
I am still ambivalent because Mr. Cutts spoke very little about duplicate content in that video and by no means was it an exhaustive explanation. Obviously, he is an authoritative source, but I have noticed that he speaks in generalities (as he must) because no single explanation can cover all possibilites. I still feel that original content, even if paraphrased from your own copy is the best way to go. Plus, unless we are simply trying to populate a blog with copy, why wouldn't we want to write something new with a link included that the search engines would index? I understand that most people are pressed for time, but it makes sense to me, if you take the time to re-post something, it wouldn't take an extraordinary amount of time to wordsmith your content and get SEO benefit with no chance of being thrown in the sandbox. Thank you Katerina for opening the conversation.
Typical Google, "Here is what ya do, sort of kind of, maybe..."
Links are good...links are bad...links are links unless they are the missing link.
You can still read somewhere under Google Web Master Tools where it says links are good but the general consensus developing is that they are not all that.
[GOOGLE] It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma - Winston Churchill
Interesting post... But I just wanted to make you aware: This page took FOREVER to load. My status bar seemed to indicate that the listings from RealBird were to blame. I just wanted to let you know about the slowdown FYI.
Question: Do you posts your posts also on Trulia. One esteemed AR member said "No. Don't do it. Don't let them have your traffic". I got 202 click-throughs from Trulia to my site last month. Which is probably 20%. I think I probably had 1000 blog views on Trulia last month.
What would you do? What do you do? Where do you post?
I subscribed to the Google Webmaster blog and I read that article, although I didn't quite understand it in its entirety. I will go back to view the youtube video. In the past, I put up my posts on my website first, let it index it, then post it to AR. Sounds like I don't need to do that anymore, huh?
Thats interesting Loreena. It was emphatically suggested to post to AR first for best results, but I guess that is for the Best Results of AR. Which I have no problem with, because my blogging will be successful only because of AR, its staff & members, like you
Another great read Katerina/Nestor. I had actually suspended/become more selective which blogs I put on my other sites. Now I will not.
Katerina, Hearing about Duplicate Content had me trying to find time to submit to other places as well as re-writing much of my work. It was so time consuming I had to give it up. Now it seems I don't have to worry. Actually, my concern is the plagarizers who "steal" my articles as their own. I often find them under Google Alerts and have not been able to stop them.
Thanks Everyone for the great comments! I am off to teach cub scouts and will be back to address questions and make some additional comments. Today was a super busy day teaching our SEO webinar and dealing with a short sale situation.
Evening Katerina, Well, that clears that one up ! I had always thought the duplicate content thing was pretty cut and dried. Your excellent explanation makes it clear that we "Rainers shouldn't worry ! Well done.
Katerina- Thank you for explaining Duplicate Content. I was never quite sure if I could replicate my posts to my website or another outside blog. I'll check back for some answers to the questions others posed.
Man... if some people were right in their thinking, news sites would be SOL, since almost everything on the big ones is syndicated all over the place...
I point mine back to one point to make it the authority...
89 comments! That is awesome! I am glad so many of you are reading and learning on Active Rain. The support here is great and when you leave comments of course that helps me to know what you want me to write about:) Thanks!
There are some questions in regards to where you should post first. That all depends. Don't you just love that NOT cut and dried answer! It depends on what you goal is. The goal should depend on where you are getting most of your business from.
For us, we get most of our sellers from our active rain blog, not our active blog and not our website. We get most of our buyers from realbird widgets that we post on our AR blog and we get a LOT of buyers from our point 2 agent site. So since Nestor and I are listing agents, it is a no brainer where I will post first. Of course I am gambling on the landlord ( Active Rain) being able to change the locks on us- but that is a chance I am willing to take due to the amount of closed business we have received as a result of posting on Active Rain. I am also here to move my coaching business forward. I have a captive audience right here. Why would I go to blogger or wordpress to build a clientele that I can have right here in front of 160,000 members? It is a no brainer. Of course I need to develop my coaching website- a work presently in progress- as well as a good wordpress blog for our niche. I am also developing a website for a new up and coming niche for real estate that I am working on. But my main focus at this time is on Active Rain because that is where the money is coming from right now. Katerina
Thanks for the information. I copy my blog to at least five different places every time I write one, and I've been a little worried about this... but you've taken my worries away. I'll sleep better tonight.
I have noticed that sometimes my AR outside blog comes up higher than AR or localism or the other way around.
I am thinking that search results for certain keywords will bring up the one that has the most concentration of those keywords. My website generally comes up for more generalized RE terms, with my outside blog usually coming up for the longer longtails and AR and Localism right behind it. Not sure about this.
OK, finally, my point.....if we were being penalized for duplicate content, all three would not be coming up for the same longtails, right?
Virginia- You are right, if you were getting penalized all would not be coming up. All should not be coming up anyways, it is only a matter of time before the algorithms catch up to us who show up for the same content on the same SERP. But here is the exception: AR is the author of your AR blog. You are the author of your AR active blog. Point 2 or whoever is the author ( maybe, maybe not- depends on your url) of your website. The same content can be pulled up by different authors. Google looks to the owner of the domain or URL for authorship. I ghink that is why you are coming up for more than one post on the same SERP.
Steven- We have done short sales since 1995; since now that is the bulk of our business we made it a point to be on top, get educated, get in the field, work our butts off carrying 30 to 50 listings- we are down to 38 right now, but have 5 listings coming in this week; hopefully:)
I have been studying SEO and online marketing since December of 2006. I absolutely am fascinated by it and have a passion for teaching, so it works out well:) I love to coach, my passion is to inspire others to live their dreams thereby making a difference in the lives of others. Nestor and I were taking for some very big deep pocket rides - getting ripped off by website companies, etc when real estate first went on the internet scene. Never again, I vowed! So the only way I found to avoid snake oil this time around was to learn it all myself. Now when we hire people we know if they are truthful or not:) Katerina
Katerina - Thanks for the info clarifying the issues associated with duplicate content. I had heard - but wasn't following the issue. Glad to see that I can keep posting to targeted places.
Katerina - I didn't view the Matt Cutts video, but my view on duplicate content agrees with this sentence from your post.
They will just ignore the others.
So, essentially Google decides which one is the authority (usually based on when posted unless you take other actions) and views the rest as duplicates.
When I learned SEO years ago, the conventional wisdom was that changing your content by 30% essentially makes it a new post. As far as I know, that hasn't changed. What have you heard?
Katerina - Very helpful information. As we continue to add more and more social media to our marketing, the fear of duplication is very real. Thanks for the post!!
Thank you, great information. I have always copied our content in our different sites and never thought I would be punished for it. Now it is nice to know I can continue on.
Great info Katerina. This has to be one of the top misconceptions of most bloggers. Those that truly know SEO realize there is no issue and in fact will help your online presence to be in more places than one. Having multiple entries when someone does a search is better than one!
Great Information. The question is, even if you don't get GOOGLE SLAPPED, are you waisting your time by dupicating content that is considered irrelevant by google.
Time IS money!
I've wondered how thi evolved. I recently have been invited to blog with HousingStorm. Although I hve acouple of posts there, I was concerned with this very topic. Guess I owe HS some new material.
Katrina, thanks for the information. At first I had been duplicating content on AR and my website blog and even on Trulia. Then I had read that duplicating content would penalize your google ratings so I started writing about the same topic but changing it around...talk about time consuming! Great info! Thanks again for sharing!
Great post... simple clear message! Thanks for sharing. This will help clear up a lot of misconceptions about duplicate content that a lot of us have been puzzled by... will save time when posting blogs, also. Thanks again...
Katerina... great information. I confirmed this about 2 years ago through someone that Missy Caulk new that also worked in Google. I see so many people panic about this topic. Glad that you got it out there.
Great post. Very thorough. Although, I never worried about it too much.
Take a look at all of the articles sites out there. People will post the same articles on Ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, searchwarp.com etc. and they never get penalized for duplicate content.
Very timely update on SEO. You don't want to get on the wrong side of Google on this. Changing of content slightly is now moot as well, so can forget about that.
Katerina - Wow! What an impressive response and rightfully so. Kick ass post, here. I've learned so much about Google, SEO, & such right here on AR. Thanks for continuing to provide quality information for the community.
WoW, over 120 Comments and I only commented 3 times out of 124 comments! That is a great turn out! Thanks everyone! Love your comments and I am glad this helped you to understand and bust the myths of duplicate content. There is no way that I can return 120+ comments and still work and write more posts. I am attempting to address certain statements and questions that would benefit the whole group reading. I have a ton of posts to write for you and for localism so I need to get going and get it all out of my mind and onto the blog! Thanks again so much for all of your comments!
Ken Cook- I am honored!
You want to be in many places and that does not dilute your return on SERPS. Some of you have made comments about that you heard that duplicate content reduces your standing in Google. That all depends on what standings you are talking about and what those standings mean to your business. In choosing authoritive sites- we will never know all of Google's secrets, because they are in competition with Yahoo, AOL, BING and all the other search engines. If they spilled all the beans, then they would not be as strong as they are. Also, that just leads to more spam. Spammers love to ruin a good thing, like I wrote about what happened in Squidoo.
But the rankings you are hearing about is the reducing of your pagerank. What they are telling you is that the more of the same content you put out there it could dilute your pagerank. Well, pagerank and SERPS are 2 different things and who really needs to care about pagerank if you are on page one on Google for your keywords and your phone is ringing translating into closed sales. So don't get pagerank and SERPS mixed up. Katerina
Thank you for this post. I started a blog on wordpress about 4 yearsw ago and started an AR blog a little over a year ago and post all of my blog postrs to AR now, but I still duplicgte my AR posts that deal with financinng and interest rate updates to my wordpress blog. I have worried about whether this counts as duplicate content and was relieved to read that it does not.
One thing you raise in your comment above that confuses me is pagerank. i used to have a pagerank of 3 for my website http://www.maureenmegowan.com and now for some reason it says my pagerank is zero. My placing on SERP results however are still page one for all of my main keywords. My website has far more content than any other realtor in my area, and Google seems to recognize this. Bing, on the other hand, seems to come up with their search results almost as if they are random. Many of their page one results are basic template sites that have no original content. If you could email me with any comments you have about whether pagerank has any relevance I would appreciate it.
I also have noticed that Bing results seem to be random and changeable and wonder about that - is it just that they are relatively new? Yahoo results are quite different from Google - it takes longer to get top results, but they stay up longer without much effort on my part - what goes on Yahoo stays on Yahoo?
GREAT information! I had been doing a work around by adding a paragraph before and after the content to see if that would "fool" it. It's been more work that I wanted to do
Maureen- I am sorry. I do not have the time to email a private discussion on pagerank. I get so many emails each day with requests for help and there is no way that I can reach each person so therefore I try to take your questions and answer them in posts so that way more people can get helped at the same time. I also wrote in my comments back here about pagerank.
Pagerank is one of those secrets that Google won't share about. They keep changing the way they evaluate pagerank. One day you could be a pagerank of 3 and the next day a 0. That is typical for google. Google does place a lot of relevance on page rank in regards to how many authoritative sites are one way linking in to you, inbound links. I don't even worry about it, my ego might, but I don't because it has little to nothing to do with my phone ringing and how sellers find us. Katerina
All the search engines use different algorithms, thus the competition to be the #1 search engine. Bing is new and their algorithms are totally different than google's. Of course, none of them are going to disclose their proprietary information.
I will tell you that Yahoo is very different. Yahoo likes to reward those who pay them. So in Yahoo SERPS you will get those that have paid for being in their directory first before the real organic search results and it does not look the same as google's paid sponsors because google is very clear about the separation of organic and paid. We rank really high on Yahoo. When I check mybloglog- I get a lot of yahoo searches and we are placed high on page one.
I certainly hope that the google robots are able to distinguish between duplicate content from an individual blogger, versus a spammer that is posting and reposting over and over again. I wish Craigslist would have similar logic, because that IS a spammer's duplicate listing delight.
Weichert- This is easy for Google to tell. The spammers use software that generates hundreds of websites or blogs with the exact same content. They are very obviously dupicate content with the intent to game the system. There is SO much of this going on that they keep google quite busy. Too busy to worry about one of blog posts being generated a few times. Their bots know what to look for. Remember that google will choose one post as authority and ignore the rest.
Thank you so much for posting this information. I've read so much information about duplicate content that I think I was getting a bit paranoid! It's good to know that posting in more than one place is not going to cause problems.
This is (as all 142 comments clearly state) a great blog at a even better time! I have heard so much conflicting information on this subject matter it is frustrating!
THanks for the info. I recently was penalized by google and can't figure why. Even if I google my first and last name it doesn't show my site on the first page http://www.karinaleal.com
I sent an email to google and haven't received any answers yet. I used to get at least 10 leads daily from my site and now am down to zero...
If you would have any additional information, please do let me know. Thanks, Karina.
Wellington Florida Real Estate Blog By Katerina Gasset of International Properties & Investments, Inc. is a Great Place For Real Estate Agents and Potential Buyers and Sellers to get to know more about Wellington Florida as well as other parts of Palm Beach County.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
Posted by 
;)
;)
Wow , thank you Katerina. All I have heard is that you should not copy stuff from one place to the next, and it is so difficult to write 3 different posts about one subject when that is the main subject of the day or week or whatever. That makes things so much easier. Great info, as always.