Official Google Guide On Duplicate Content

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Google has finally addressed the issue of the effects of duplicate content and how it affects SERPS in the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Duplicate content occurs in 2 ways:

Within-your-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content which (often unintentionally) appears in more than one place on your site.

Cross-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content of your site which appears (again, often unintentionally) on different external sites.

In the first case, the penalty is the highest. Google states that if duplicate content is found within the same site, “the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.”

In the second case, Google says that they have the means to determine which site is the original, so you “shouldn’t be very concerned about seeing negative effects on your site’s presence on Google.”.

However, many comments have countered that Google’s claim to being able to determine the site with the original content is greatly exaggerated. Some observed that scraped sites with enough backlinks still outrank the original site. A good point brought up is that if Google can tell which are the scraper sites, why does Google still index them?

Read the full discussion here.

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Comments

One Response to “Official Google Guide On Duplicate Content”

Palapple on July 5th, 2008 10:57 pm

It is important not to over-do anything on SEO. Apart from duplicate contents, excessive link building is also an eternal sin that will incur Google’s penalty.

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