Duplicate Content- Fact Vs Fiction!

Duplicate Content- Fact versus Fiction!

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.

 

 

Duplicate Content - Fact Vs Fiction!  by Coach Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

By TwitterButton