8 Facts About Duplicate Content and Google

EDIT 12-Dec: We're talking about duplicate *content* in significant numbers. After reading the comments I want to clarify - reposting your AR article to your hometown blog is not duplicate content. Creating 10 blogs and posting the same articles to them every day, day in and day out is duplicate content.

Over the years I have addressed "duplicate content" at least 10 times here on this blog, another 5 or more times on Social Media Edge radio and no telling how many times at conventions and seminars where I have been speaking. 

It still comes up.

Here are the facts, Googlesque, about duplicate content:

• Chances are none of you are guilty of overloading the Google indexing engine with duplicate content.
• You can have a limited amount of duplicated content without penalty - for example you may have a "web presentable page", a "print formatted page", a "plain text page", and a "mobile optimized page" all with identical content on the same domain.
• If you use duplicate content for the reasons listed above use the canonical page tag to help Google's indexing engine. For example if you have two pages of identical information at say http://icobb.com/landings/index.php and http://ahkse.com/homeloans/index.php and you want the icobb URI to be the indexed version you would put the following in the head of http://ahkse.com/homeloans/index.php: 
  <link rel="canonical" href=" http://icobb.com/landings/index.php"/>
• Google *may* index only one of your pages with the duplicated content.
• Google will certainly only pick one of your duplicated pages to rank higher than the others.
• I have seen duplicate pages ranking in the top ten at least 6 times for the same content - this is claimed by Google to "not happen". The reason it does is because the other content on the pages is significantly different.
• Keeping the above in mind Google suggests you don't even use content filled headers, footers and sidebars. In reality I haven't seen that impact as duplicate data.
• If you publish 10 carbon copy blogs and you are ranking high on multiples your biggest risk is your competitor complaining to Google and having them de-index all of your sites without warning.

And directly from Google engineering:

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

What does this mean?

It means you're probably okay and no in any danger with Google unless you're posting every blog post 3, 5 or 10 times on the same sites. Even if you're doing it just two or three times only one is going to rank higher than the rest and if you get 3 or more in the top ten for the same content and same search terms Google may not catch you but your competitor just may complain!

Need me to look at your site and see if you have this and other necessary steps completed? Yes, even if you have WordPress you could still be non-compliant. Call me at 678-439-8683 or connect with me here.

 

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Ken Cook - Web coder (I write the programs that make the whole world zing!) (678) 439-8683 Anything your mind can conceive I can create - online that is!

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NOTICE: I have been writing in this blog since July 2006. Some of the older articles may contain information that has changed. Please check the date and phone me if you have any questions.