There is much concern amongst website owners that their website pages may be dropped or that severe penalties will be imposed on their rankings if Google detects that there is duplicate content. This is, to some degree, a misnomer. Read more to understand the impact that duplicate content has on your Google rankings.
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content means that there is a substantial amount of repeated content that matches rather closely (or exactly) with other content either on the same website or across multiple websites on the Internet. Duplicate content often occurs unintentionally and with no ill intentions to trick the search engines. Some websites have the same or similar pieces of content within one domain, other company’s innocently enter into shared content partnership as a business strategy, and company’s are increasingly syndicating their website articles to multiple article banks and publisher websites as part of their Web PR strategy.
Sadly though, there are instances where content is duplicated across multiple domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or where content is simply plagiarized by other website owners with the intention of claiming credit for the content. These issues are addressed below and as far as possible; a suggestive remedy has been included.
What is a duplicate content penalty?
A duplicate content penalty is not really a ‘penalty’ as such. You will not be penalised or dropped from the Google index for having duplicate content on your own website, or sharing content with another website, however you should be aware that only one page get’s the credit for the content. In other words, the page that is first indexed for the content by Google is the one who usually receives the ‘credit’ for it. All that really means is that the duplicated content may not show up in the Google search results.
Remember that the purpose of a search engine is to provide the most relevant and unique content to the browsers. Therefore, not every duplicated page should get displayed in the search results. This also protects website owners against having their stolen content rank higher than the original content. So to prevent Google’s users from seeing the same duplicated content they have created duplicate content filters to detect pages that are already indexed.
How to remedy duplicate content issues?
Duplicate pages on your own website:
If you have a page that sells ‘new boats’ for instance, and another page that sells ‘used boats’, however the general marketing copy is very much the same except for the word ‘new’ or ‘used’ that alternates, then don’t go into a panic thinking that you will be penalised for this. The very worst that will happen is that possibly only the ‘new boats’ page (or alternatively, only the ‘used boats’ page) will get credited for the content. In other words, only the one page will show up in the search results when searching for a phrase ‘new or used boats’.
How to best remedy this: Make sure that your similar pages are at least 60% different (different words, page titles, headlines, hyperlinks and images). Another scenario is when you have a printer version of the same content. In this instance you should rather direct the search engines to index the preferred (original) content as opposed to the print version. If you leave the search engine to decide the most relevant page, it may display the print version in the search results instead. You can disallow the printer versions from being indexed in your robots.txt file. You can also use 301 redirects (“RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to redirect both the search engines and human visitors to the preferred page.
Republished pages (articles) on other websites:
If you have created an article or press release and have distributed it to other website owners or article banks to be published, you could stand the risk of them being indexed for your content instead of your own website ranking for the same content.
How to best remedy this: Makes sure that your articles or press releases appear on your own website first. Submit this page to the search engines (e.g.: www.google.com/addurl/) and then check that the page is indexed by the search engines before you submit it to other websites to be published. If you are syndicating your content you should make absolutely sure that you include a link to your web page where the original content resides to ensure that your content benefits from the back links to your website, ultimately giving the original page a higher PageRank.
Sharing your content through white labeling:
Many website owners go into affiliate partnerships where they agree to share the content on their website with other websites to be published under a white label (where the content is served by the owner onto another publishers website surrounded by the other website’s look and feel under a sub-domain). The problem with this relationship is that quite often the white labeled website gets indexed by the search engines and could ranks higher on the search results than the original website (owner of the content). As a result, the owner may drop down the rankings and the sub-domain appears higher, ultimately decreasing the original website’s rankings in the search results.
How to best remedy this: As the content is shared under ‘multiple domains’ it is regarded by Google as duplicate content. There are two options that you could consider here. The first option is to ask each of the affiliates (partners) to block the duplicate pages (sub-domain only and not the root domain) from being indexed by the spiders in the robots.txt, however this may be a little difficult if all sub-domain’s point to the same file. The second option is to dynamically create a meta noindex, follow in the head of the respective pages. Another consideration is if other sites link to yours using both the www and non-www version of your URLs, you can notify Google as to which domain you would prefer to have indexed by utilising Google’s Webmaster tools.
Plagiarized and scraped content:
Unfortunately there may be times when competitors scrape your content from your website to republish it as their own. This could provide reason for concern regarding duplicate content with the fear of the competitor getting credit for what is actually your content. Don’t stress too much as it is highly unlikely that this deviant act could impact negatively on your own website’s ranking on Google.
How to best remedy this: You can file a complaint with Google’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act to re-claim ownership of your content. To detect duplicate content make use of Copyscape’s Website plagiarism search tool.
The best advice that I can offer in terms of duplicate content issues is simply to be aware of it and become mindful on the measures that can be implemented to ensure that both the search engines as well as the user receive the most relevant and most unique content when searching for information.
