There Is No Duplicate Content Curse … Period!

The word on the street is that if you use duplicate content on your blog, the search engines will penalize you. 

Some marketers have even gone as far as saying that your site will be deindexed so there is a wave of fear sweeping the Internet right now and of course there are those capitalizing on this fear!

But, what’s the real scoop on Duplicate Content?

What I will say is that “There is No Duplicate Content Curse … Period!

Being penalized by the search engines for having duplicate content on your site is a myth, it’s a lie and an outright blatant excuse for some marketers to make money from you! 

You can still get traffic from duplicate content on your blog but what certainly isn’t acceptable is using mirror sites, i.e. having two identical sites with identical content to try and trick the search engines.

Having a mirror site does not even have to be deliberate as in the case of Brad Fallon of My Wedding Favors whose webmasters copied the entire content of his wedding favors site during some maitenance initiative and inadvertently hosted it on a server where the search engines could get access. 

Brad’s site was deindexed and it took him about a year to make up with Google again … another clear indicator that even if a mirror site is created, it doesn’t have to stay in a black hole forever.  If this happens to you, you better have a good arguement for the search engines though as well as another plan of action to get traffic to your site whilst your site is in limbo.

So, as they say on the kiddies programs … “do NOT try this at home!”

Okay, you’re still skeptical and you want proof that if you use duplicate content on your site, the search engines are not going to sting you?

Well, here’s a snippet from Google Webmaster Central Blog about duplicate content:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/duplicate-content-summit-at-smx.html

Notice what it says below the red line …

“If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.” 

First off, this means that it isn’t a good idea to take a load of Private Label Rights (PLR) content and post them onto your site because Google is looking for uniqueness.

So how does Google determine which article is unique if there are duplicate copies of the same article?

It used to be said that the search results would show the article that Google indexed first, but in his report, Search Engine Myths Exposed, Jonathan Leger explains that there are primarily two things that determine which version of the duplicate article Google will choose …

They are links to the page and title tag.

Sadly, that free report linked to above is no longer available and I was deeply disappointed when I sent the details of this report to my readers and very few downloaded it.  Why was I so disappointed?  Because I was a subscriber to a $800 per month membership site which was great, but in my view did not bust these myths as well as Jonathan’s free report did.

Anyway, I digress!

What Google are looking for are links from the page that matches the search query typed in by the searcher and, if it finds no links with that search term, it will look for pages that whose title matches the query.

In other words, if you have a page that has many “good quality” links coming into it from other sites with the search term in the anchor text, you have a very good chance of ranking well in the search engines.  It also means that if there are no anchor text links to the page, but the article that wrote on your blog and then submitted to the article directories contains the search term in the title, you could dominate the top 10, 20, 30 positions in the search engines with that one article despite the fact that the search engines have indicated that they want to serve up variety.

Why would they do this?  Because your article was the most relevant to the term searched for.

Marketers have also claimed that it’s the article that is indexed first by the search engines that wins.  Jonathan Leger refutes this argument and has proved that the page with the most links wins!  

If you really want to know more about the duplicate content filters and, I think you should be interested since knowing how it works can take out the “slog” of posting unique content on you blog, I highly recommend that you check out the posts Jonathan Leger has on his site about duplicate content.

I hope you’ll also check out Jonathan’s Share a Post software and find out how to ethically use duplicate content on your site as well as get traffic from some of the great articles in its repository.

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