This week Google clarified what has become known as the “Google duplicate content penalty”.

Duplicate content is a huge topic for discussion in online marketing and SEO circles and is considered to be a factor that can threaten ranking, positioning, traffic and consequently sales. It has long been believed that Google imposes a penalty if your webpage is found to contain duplicate content. So this week Google put the penalty myth to bed stating:

There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

But first…what is duplicate content?

Google defines duplicate content as:

Substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

Types of duplicate content

Google considers duplicate content spam. Websites with identical pages as well as websites that are identical to another website on the Internet are considered to be spam. Affiliate sites with the same look and feel which contain identical content, for example, are especially vulnerable to a duplicate content filter. other examples of content that may be considered duplicate:

Scraped content: scraped content is taking content from a website and using it on another webpage so that it is more or less a duplicate page. With the popularity of blogs on the internet and the syndication of those blogs, scraping is becoming more of a problem for search engines.

eCommerce product descriptions: many eCommerce sites use the manufacturer’s descriptions for the products they list. The problem is, many other eCommerce site are using the same content, this is especially true in competitive markets and popular goods, think ipod, iphone, sony shuffle. This type of content is also considered duplicate.

Distribution of articles: If you publish an article and it gets copied and put all over the Internet this too may be considered duplicate content.

Google says that it ‘filters’ not ‘penalises’ duplicate content

So in order to make a search more relevant to a user, Google uses a filter that removes the duplicate content pages from the search results. A search engine robot crawls a website, reads the pages, and stores the information in its database. Then it compares its findings to other information it has in its database. Depending upon a few factors, such as the overall relevancy score of a website, it then determines which are duplicate content, and then filters out the pages or the websites that qualify as spam. Unfortunately, if your pages are not spam, but have enough similar content, they may still be regarded as spam.

In terms of search engine rankings Google views a penalty as points deducted from a page in order to come to an overall relevancy score. But in reality, duplicate content pages are not penalised rather they are simply filtered out and sometimes good legitimate content is filtered accidentally because it may be so related to content elsewhere.

Google advice to avoid the duplicate content filter

• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

• Avoid… “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Read the original article form Google