March 15, 2007 Comments
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One of the most misunderstood issues in the search engine optimization world is duplicate content. From what it is to what impact it will have on your rankings to whether or not it will get your site penalized, small business owners tend to find themselves going in circles as they try to figure it all out. That's why Jill Whalen has put together a great article titled "The Duplicate Content Penalty Myth."
First, let's get the quick answer out there in the open: Duplicate content will not get you banned or penalized if you aren't breaking other search engine rules. What's more likely to happen is that your duplicate content simply won't rank.
See? That wasn't so difficult.
Jill goes on to explain more:
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 its 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.
Search engine penalties are reserved for pages and sites that are purposely attempting 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 an infraction through spam reports and other means. To many people's surprise, penalties rarely happen to the average website. Most that receive a penalty know exactly what they did to deserve it.
If you want to understand all of the how's and why's of duplicate content, you should probably read the full article though.
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