Is Duplicate Content Really Bad For Our Websites?
Anand Srinivasan is the founder of KnewThis.com – the World’s FIRST Ask&Answer site where affiliate webmasters can build back links and get targeted traffic. Learn more about KnewThis by clicking here
First and foremost, before I begin this article, I would like to clarify that I am not an SEO expert. I am simply yet another webmaster who recently launched his own website and who has learnt a bit of SEO along the way. Also, this article is not a definitive piece in itself, but is just to instigate a bit of discussion from our individual experiences.
A lot many times, we have been told by Google as well as SEO experts that duplicate content hurts our website. And we have indeed taken efforts to minimize the incidence of duplicated content by writing rehashed articles so that Google does not detect it as something copied from elsewhere.
So, the question is does duplicate content actually affect our website rankings? Though I would personally still believe that duplicate content is good neither for our own website nor for the Internet as a whole, I would like to discuss here about two instances where I have observed that duplicate content does not affect rankings to a great extent. Firstly, from my own blog. When I first started blogging, like most of you, I had it hosted on Blogspot. This blogspot blog was my primary site for more than a year before I thought I should move to a .com domain. At this point, I had no idea about duplicate content affecting SERPS. I had no idea how to use 301 redirect to effect a seamless transfer. All that I did was use the Import tool on Wordpress to import the whole content from the blogspot site to my new .com blog. It has been over two years since then. Till date, my blogspot website continues to exist and that has not affected my .com site’s ranking one bit. My site is still growing at 25% month on month (on a lower base though).
The second example is drawing from the success of article directories. Article directories like EzineArticles and GoArticles are among the most heavily trafficked websites in the world. A lot of their content is duplicated elsewhere. And they still they remain the primary source of traffic for a lot of affiliate webmasters amongst us.
So, does that mean duplicate content does not matter at all? Of course, it does. But from what I presume, while duplicate content is accounted for in the search engine rankings, websites are not explicitly penalized. If I copy content from a popular website, I shall not be penalized. Rather, when someone searches Google for a related topic, Google realizes that the site I copied from holds better authority than my own copied content and so decides to display their link.
Do you agree? What has been your experience with duplicate content? Please let us know in the comments.
10 Comments
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Google duplicate content penalty is a myth. Everyone who might be into SEO says so, even I for some time. After watching a video and hearing it from Google themselves. I came to realize that there is no penalty for duplicate content. But in fact the real deal is that Google might just want to pick the best version of a specific post or whatever, and display it first when there is an inquiry.
I donn’t know, but what your feeling if your content duplicated by some one?
Not really. But i hate if someone stolen my content without telling us first. At least give us some credit and never do copy 100% from our content.
I am not sure about the duplicate content issue. I have read a lot of various discussions, many say what you say, and many say it’s not a myth.
I have been thinking about the use of PLR, where you can buy awesome articles and just publish them as blog posts, without rewriting a single word. I have many articles like that, but I have never published them on my blog – probably because I’m scared of Google.
I realized not long ago, that another blog I visited had published several of the same articles as I had bought, and that blog had a lot of traffic and more than 40 comments at the bottom of the article. That’s the identical article as I could have published
not sure but its help new blogger to keep their site alive(including me). i usually using plr articles and change it a little bit before publish it…
I also think, if the duplicate content is not even a myth, then how is it that sometimes the news agencies have the same news and their websites are still in first place of Google?
I think SEOs do not want to tell the whole truth to us, because they do not want to lose their jobs. If I said something stupid, please correct me.
Jacques, from Brazil
A duplicate content only counts when you have the same article more than once on the same site.. In this case Google will only index one copy of the same article. When the same content appears on several sites, this is quite natural for online and offline media by the way, some on the results may get pushed into supplemental index. But there is no penalty for duplicate content.
Many people still believe that a penalty exists, it never did, this was a marketing scare tactic put about by people wishing to push their own product to overcome duplicate content penalty, this myth as been repeated time and time again until people started to believe it.
Thanks for the post was really helpful.
I’m really not sure how important original content is to SEO ranking but I believe that it’s important to bring value to your visitor and the best way to do that is to offer them something they can get nowhere else.
Here is my take on Duplicate Content…and I am an SEO by trade.
The first to publish something gets the credit from Google. Then whoever puts the content out after is considered duplicate and ignored by Google.
But there is no PENALTY for Duplicate content, if there were then you could sabotage all of your competitors.