Duplicated Content, Is It Really That Bad?
Duplicated Content, Is It Really That Bad?
The idea is that search engines don’t like the same content appearing in different places; after all, why would they want to provide people with lots of different ways to get to the same information? As a Google employee stated on Google Webmaster Central blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com):
Our users typically want to see a diverse cross-section of unique content when they do searches, in contrast, they’re understandably annoyed when they see substantially the same content within a set of search results.
What does Google do about duplicated content? In general, it tries to eliminate copies. For instance:
… if your site has articles in “regular” and “printer” versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a no index meta tag, we’ll choose one version to list.
A lot of paranoia exists about duplicated content, or talk about sites can get themselves banned for using duplicated content. Most of this talk is gross exaggeration because sites often have good reasons to have duplicated content. Perhaps you’re running news feeds from a popular central source or using press releases about events in your industry. It wouldn’t make since for search engines to penalize people for such innocent uses. Thus as this employee stated,
In the rare cases in which we perceive 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. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments… so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that will befall webmasters is to see the “less desired” version of a page shown in our index.
In fact, there are various reasons why search engines can’t penalize sites for republishing content. Who will they punish – every site holding the content or all but the first one to publish it? And, how would they know who was first?
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