View Cart
RSS FeedDuplicate Content Penalties a Myth?
I ran across an interesting article at Practical eCommerce that proposes that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. I tend to agree with the author that while there are some negatives to having duplicate content (e.g. page rank from links dispersed across all the pages that share the same content), it ultimately appears that each and all of the pages can and do often appear within search engine results.
What do you think?
Interesting article but I think I’ll take my information from the horses mouth. Of course the horse would be Google which probably sends the vast majority of traffic to everyone’s sites.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359
Here’s an interesting line:
“Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, 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.”
Of course the IMPORTANT part of that quote is this piece:
“Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users”
And some further reading from the above article…
“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.”
“Intent to manipulate our rankings”, “unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results”.
Does anyone really know exactly what this means? I don’t. I don’t think I want to mess around with it either since my ignorance to Googles “perceptions” could cost me quite a bit in the online e-commerce world.
A myth? Not in my opinion.
DaK