We’ve all heard it before: there’s one right way to do things, and a hundred wrong ways. Optimizing your website for search is no exception. In the SEO world, there are plenty of things that can hurt your ranking. But surprisingly, duplicate content isn’t one of them. For a long time, webmasters have been under the impression that Google metes out a “duplicate content penalty,” but recent developments and communications from Google seem to indicate that this isn’t the case… at least not in the way that people think.
There are two kinds of duplicate content: malicious and non-malicious. Maliciously duplicated content occurs when a webmaster deliberately duplicates content across or within domains in order to generate more web traffic—the idea being that duplicate content equals duplicate keywords. It’s not exactly keyword stuffing; it’s more like keyword spreading, and is designed to manipulate web crawlers, search engines, and ultimately the users themselves. But since Google’s objective is to give users as much diversified and relevant content as possible, they don’t take kindly to spammers. This practice is likely to result in Google making a deliberate hit to your page rank.
But non-malicious duplicate content is different. It’s more common, and occurs without any deliberate intention on the part of webmasters. Examples of this are things like multiple URLs that lead to the same content (without canonicalized URLs, this give the appearance of duplicate content to a crawler), the existence of printer only versions of web pages, the same articles and blogs posted on different websites, or versions of web pages formatted down for mobile devices. This results in multiple pages within a web site (or across domains) containing essentially the same content. But Google has been clear about the fact that a duplicate content penalty for these sorts of things is just a myth.
Greg Grothaus, part of Google’s Search Quality Team, insists that if a webpage is not ranking because of duplicate content, it is only because Google is trying to provide users with the most unique search results possible. And while Google recognizes that most duplicate content is not deceptive, they’re not going to sacrifice the integrity and usability of their search engine. When it comes to duplicate content, the search engines are not actually penalizing webmasters—they’re just trying to give users a little assortment in the results. And just because your content is getting filtered out, that doesn’t mean you’re being penalized.
Unfortunately, it still doesn’t mean that duplicate content won’t have a negative impact on your page rank. You might need to take the steps to avoid what’s avoidable. Using canonicalized URLs, linking pages properly and consistently, and providing as much unique content as possible on each of your site pages can help to avoid some of the duplicate content pitfalls. And of course, good SEO practices across the board should help you make the jump to page one.
