Thread: The Dangers of Duplicate Content

Why you need unique content for your website:

Exclusive Video: If you optimize your site with respect to the search engine industry, I'm sure you are aware of the specter of duplicate content. Even accidentally repeated content can cause ranking issues, something we are all trying to avoid.

At the Seattle SMX Conference, our own Mike McDonald caught with Google engineer extraordinaire Matt Cutts to discuss this very issue. Cutts himself acknowledges duplicate content is an interesting dilemma even for Google to tackle, something he indicates while discussing the concept of content reclamation:

"You always have to worry about how it can be spammed. What if someone innocent doesn't claim their content and then and smart spammer comes along and claims everybody else's content... That's a tricky thing."

The second session from the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle was focused on the issue of duplicate content.

Eytan Seidman, Lead Program Manager, Live Search, Microsoft said you should be concerned with duplicate content on your site because it fragments your pages in some way. In order to avoid duplicate content, he said to keep session parameters simple.

For local sites he recommended having unique content on them and if you don't have different content, you most likely don't need multiple pages. To avoid people copying your content, he said to tell people that are going to use your content to attribute.

Peter Linsley, Senior Product Manager for Search, at Ask.com gave a standard definition of duplicate content saying it was the same content on multiple urls. The reason it is bad for search engines is because users do not want to see the same content result.

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As for avoiding duplicate content you should use copyright or creative commons notice. Also make the content unique and difficult to be taken out of context.

Amit Kumar, Senior Engineering Manager, Yahoo Search, said that Yahoo tries to crawl links from duplicate, less; so fewer visits from the crawler could mean that the content may be considered duplicated. He added if you get content from somewhere else you should attribute.

Vanessa Fox, Google, Product Manager weighed in on duplicate content saying they want to show unique information so they want to avoid duplicated information.

If you have pages that are fairly similar, you may want to consider combining the two. In some cases, pages that are similar just need to be distinguished from one another a bit more.

On client site redirects, she said a 301 is considered a client side redirect because the client is actually taken from one page to another and the crawler can see the message.

On search engines reaching out to Word Press and blog software types to avoid duplicate content, she said there is a lot they can do as far as working with the CMS software people to come up with better solutions so end users won't have to worry about duplicate content.

Article by Mike Sachoff, who writes about ebusiness for WebProNews.

Yes, unfortunatelly this is correct what you say.
For one year I have started an experiment with two of my new real estate site.
For the first one I wrote 10 different articles and have posted them on 10 different sites. All 10 articles was recognised from google and yahoo as valid links.
For the seccond site I have written 1 article and have posted it to more than 200 sites - and guess what - 0 (zero) links!

So - avoid duplicate contant!

great read.....

I have been doing quite a bit of research on the subject of duplicate content from various forums, etc. I have been told by a lot of these people that there is actually a penalty from Google if duplicate content is found? How valid is that?

LOTrainer, i'm not sure if that's true, but it would make sense for google to penalize those who duplicate content("steal content") in it's attempt to provide good quality sites in their searches. As we know, they already did that with the people who had "hidden text"(by different ways, meaning it was not visible to users, it was there just for SEO purpouses) on their sites

They don't penalize duplicate content because they might end up penalizing the person who originally wrote the content instead of the person who stole it.

When they find duplicate content they send one copy into cyber oblivion and the other copy is used in the serps.

For Real Estate websites we have 2 main problems with duplicate content.

The first one is MLS systems with many websites. You write one property description and it's displayed on many websites. Well which site will rank for that content?


Similar or duplicate property descriptions within your own website. In my case, we have some properties with the same description. For convenience if we had multiple apartments in the same building we wrote similar or same descriptions. An error, I know, but it did happen. Obviously google decides which page to list and only lists one if any of the duped property pages.

I've read articles where both sites were penalized, i'm not sure if both of them were penalized the same, but that's what it said there(as you said Greg, google couldn't know which one originally wrote the content). marcosll, what you're saying is right about similar content. There are many sites which display the same info, but you won't see many urls which will display the same info, exactly in the same way( titles, description, keywords, ... are different so the content it's not exactly the same on the page)

Great read! I too have been hearing a lot about duplicate content but wonder to what extent it really matters. The net is full of dup content so how can the SE's really untangle it all? I like the example of dup real estate listings. Also what if the meta tags are different? How much does that count for not being duplicate?

athand...did your website that you submitted 200 of the same article get penilized, or was it just that it didn't rank as well? I assume you don't have that same article posted on your website.