There Is No Duplicate Content Penalty

By Jill Whalen

The SEO industry has been plagued for years by a lack of consistency with SEO terms and definitions. One of the most prevalent inaccurate terms we hear is “duplicate content penalty.” While duplicate content is not something you should strive for on your website, there’s no search engine penalty for having it.

Duplicate content has been and always will be a natural part of the Web. It’s nothing to be afraid of. If your site has some dupe content for whatever reason, you don’t have to lose sleep every night worrying about the wrath of the Google gods. They’re not going to shoot lightning bolts at your site from the sky, nor are they going to banish your entire website from ever showing up for relevant searches.

They are simply going to filter out the dupes.

The search engines want to index and show to their users (the searchers) as much unique content as algorithmically possible. That’s their job, and they do it quite well considering what they have to work with: spammers using invisible or irrelevant content, technically challenged websites that crawlers can’t easily find, copycat scraper sites that exist only to obtain AdSense clicks, and a whole host of other such nonsense.

There’s no doubt that duplicate content is a problem for search engines. If a searcher is looking for a particular type of product or service and is presented with pages and pages of results that provide the same basic information, then the engine has failed to do its job properly. In order to supply users with a variety of information on their search query, search engines have created duplicate content “filters” (not penalties) that
attempt to weed out the information they already know about. Certainly, if your page is one of those that is filtered, it may very well feel like a penalty to you, but it’s not – it’s a filter.

Penalties Are for Spammers

Search engine penalties are reserved for pages and sites that are purposely trying to trick the search engines in one form or another. Penalties can be meted out algorithmically when obvious deceptions exist on a page, or they can be personally handed out by a search engineer who discovers the hanky-panky through spam reports and other means. To many people’s surprise, penalties rarely happen to the average website. Sites that receive a true penalty typically know exactly what they did to deserve it. If they don’t, they haven’t been paying attention. Honestly, the search engines are not out to get you. If you have a page on your site that sells red hats and another very similar page selling blue hats, you aren’t going to find your site banished off the face of Google. The worst thing that will happen is that only the red hat page may show up in the search results instead of both pages showing up. If you need both to show up in the search engines, then you’ll need to make them substantially unique.

Suffice it to say that just about any content that is easily created without much human intervention (i.e., automated) is not a great candidate for organic SEO purposes.

Article Reprints

Another duplicate-content issue that many are concerned about is the republishing of online articles. Reprinting someone’s article on your site is not going to cause a penalty. While you probably don’t want every article on your site to be a reprint of someone else’s, if the reprints are helpful to your site visitors and your overall mission, then it’s not a problem for the search engines.

If your own bylined articles are getting published elsewhere, that’s a good thing. You don’t need to provide a different version to other sites or not allow them to be republished at all. The more sites that host your article, the more chances you have to build your credibility as well as to gain links back to your site through a short bio at the end of the article. In many cases, Google doesn’t even filter out duplicate articles in searches, but even if they eventually show only one version, it’s still okay.

Inadvertent Multiple URLs for the Same Content

Where duplicate content CAN be a problem is when a website shows essentially the same page, but on numerous URLs. WordPress blogs often fall victim to this when multiple tags or categories are chosen to label any one blog post. The blog software then creates numerous URLs for the same article, depending on which category or tag a user clicked to view it. While this type of duplicate content won’t cause a search engine penalty, it will
often split the overall link popularity of the article, which is not recommended.

Any backend system or CMS that creates numerous URLs for any one piece of content can indeed be a problem for search engines, because it makes their spiders do more work. It’s silly to have the spider finding the same information over and over again, when you’d rather have it finding other, unique information to index. This type of unintended duplicate content should definitely be cleaned up either through 301-redirects or by using the canonical link element (rel=canonical) [http://www.highrankings.com//canonical-link-element].

When it comes to duplicate content, the search engines are not penalizing you or thinking that you’re a spammer; they’re simply trying to show some variety in their search results pages and don’t want to waste time indexing content they already have in their databases.

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Jill Whalen, CEO  of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services http://www.highrankings.com/seo-services since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter http://www.highrankings.com/newsletter/ and the High Rankings SEO forum.

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MadViral online since 2005, MadViral Enterprises, LLC can help you market your business with Email Advertising, Professional Unique email design services

There Is No Duplicate Content Penalty

The Lifeblood of the Internet

Guest Post: By Robert Imbriale

If you’ve been involved in marketing of any kind over the last two decades, I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “content is King.” Marketers, successful marketers, live by that mantra. When I look at the Internet what I really see are two things. There is the content and then there are the applications that allow you to interact with the content.

To completely over-simplify things, the applications are what make it possible for us to create, share, and use the content we find on the Internet. So to say content is King, you’d have to also say that the applications are Queen in order to have a more complete view of the Internet. There are all kinds of applications from the browsers that make surfing the Internet possible to all sorts of applications that manage and deliver the content.

Think about it. Without the application we know as Google, how would you find the content you’re looking for on the Internet? I’ve been there and I remember finding things online was next to impossible, but that was back in 1987. Then we have Adobe TM Flash that allows us to see and hear sounds and images over the Internet.

There are all sorts of content management systems available to us today that simply didn’t exist a few years back. As it becomes easier and easier to manage and digest, the demand for new content grows and grows.

Marketers who create quality content often find they are able to generate large amounts of traffic, they usually have large mailing lists, and it almost goes without saying that they usually have healthy bank accounts.

It all starts with the content. The more you create, share, distribute, the better off you’ll be in building a profitable business on the web. If you want the real secret to Internet success, this is it.

Content comes in many forms, and it’s best to use as many forms as possible on your web site because there are now so many ways to access and use content and not everybody wants it the same way. Some people love to read, others prefer to listen, some prefer to sit back and watch a video.

As you develop your content, think about creating not just written articles, white papers, and special reports. Be sure to add streaming audio, podcasts, videos, screen-captures, and even animations to your mix.

Sometimes it’s best to offer the same content in different formats. For instance, you might offer an article as both a regular web page and a downloadable .PDF file. You might offer a video and also offer just the audio track from that same video.

Now how do you get from creating content to building a successful business?

Think about why most people use the Internet. They get online and check e-mail. They log into their social networks to keep up with their friends. They search for information to help them answer a question. They look for things to buy. They come to play games and meet people. All of these activities revolve around finding and using content.

When you’ve got content on your web site and you make it easy for people to find, you increase the traffic to your web site, naturally.

The more content you have, the more people will be stopping by your web site. Truly the days of the single-page sales letter web sites are done. You’ve got to do more than make a compelling sales pitch, you’ve got to demonstrate that you’re the leader in your market. You’ve got to show people why they need what you have and how it will truly make their lives better. And most of all, you’ve got to let them sample your stuff before they buy.

Let’s look at it from the customer’s perspective. Your customer wants the best of what’s available but how can they figure out what’s best from a sales letter alone? They need more information that’s not in the form of a sales pitch. They need to feel like they can try it on, test it out, and they can do that when you offer them plenty of content on your web site.

So if you’re selling a product that is best demonstrated in a video, be sure you have a number of videos on your web site showing customers using and loving your product. If you sell consulting, demonstrate your knowledge of your topic with articles, reports, white papers, audio presentations, and even videos of you speaking to an audience.

As you plan your content, also keep in mind how you’re going to present it on your web site so that it’s in the formats people can really use, that it’s easy to find, and that it’s readily accessible from different Internet devices, including smart phones.

If you’ll take to time to do this, what you’ll soon realize is that your sales letters will perform better, people will not need as much strong-arm salesmanship before they buy, your mailing list will grow, and your web site will show up in more places on the Internet.

It’s no surprise that web sites that offer a lot of content lead the field when it comes to sales. Take a look at your web site today and think about how a new visitor would really get to sample what it is you do without having to buy what you’re selling.

How good is your web site at attracting new visitors with little or no direct effort on your part? Do you have enough easily accessible content on your web site to keep people coming back for more?

Most web sites, including my own, can always use more great content. Adding content is the best and most profitable use of your marketing dollars because the return on your investment continues for years.

For instance, in 1991 I wrote my very first article on marketing. It was published in a national business magazine a few months later and it continues to appear on the Internet almost 20 years later. In that time, this one article has been read more than a million times, and has generated countless sales for my business. What other kind of marketing can do that?

In my opinion, no other marketing piece can do what adding fresh content to your web site can. Ideally, you’ll be adding new content regularly, and expiring content that is no longer relevant. When you do, you’ll have the most profitable marketing strategy working for you all day, every day for years to come.

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Robert Imbriale is the author of the best-selling book, Motivational Marketing (Wiley, 2007). He has personally coached thousands of business owners since he began coaching in 1995. He is a leader in the marketing industry and regularly appears on radio and television. To get your free copy of Why People Buy go to www.UltimateWealth.com/money.htm

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MadViral online since 2005, MadViral Enterprises, LLC can help you market your business with Email Advertising, Professional Unique email design services

The Lifeblood of the Internet