Duplicate Content Penalty - How to Lose Google Ranking Fast
Duplicate content penalty. Ever heard of it? This penalty is applied by Google and possibly other search engines when content found on your website is largely the same as what is found elsewhere on your site or on other websites across the internet.
Search engine spam has been common ever since search engines were first invented. Search engine spam describes the practice of making changes to your website that gets you listed high in search engines at the expense of readability by humans. Years ago, you could get ranked high on a search term simply by repeating it as many times as possible in a document. The primitive search engines of the past ranked the importance of a keyword simply by counting the number of times a term appeared on a page. Today’s search engines are much more complex.
Google has been waging war against all kinds of search engine spam and especially against duplicate content in all forms. There are two main types of duplicate content that Google is concerned about.
The first is a website that simply lists the very same page hundreds or thousands of times with simply a few words changed. This is usually done to attain high ranking on a wide range of keywords. It is most often used to get ranked high on a whole bunch of keywords unrelated to your website but can sometimes be done by a site that is on topic but simply offering duplicate content.
The second type of duplicate content that Google is concerned about revolves around affiliate programs. It has been common practice for high traffic websites to establish an affiliate program. Affiliate programs themselves don’t worry Google. What it doesn’t like though, is for an affiliate program to take a template and then offer it to its base of affiliates to use. Some of the higher traffic websites end up with thousands upon thousands of duplicate websites all promoting the very same things and, according to Google, not offering any real value to the internet community. A website offering this type of cookie cutter website can easily find themselves de-listed by Google as happened to Template Monster a while back.
The third type of duplicate content is simply not included in the Google index. This is content that is found elsewhere on the internet at large. Google and the other major search engines are interested in gathering and cataloging as much quality, unique content as possible for human consumption. To this end, they look to minimize the amount of duplicate content they allow in their index. This is why creating a new website and simply filling it with third part content will rarely if ever result in high rankings in the Google index.
The solution? Don’t rely on duplicate content as your main method of driving traffic to your site. Should you avoid all duplicate content? Of course not. What kind of duplicate content is acceptable? Answering this question is easily another article in itself.
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Columnist Joe Duchesne is the co-founder of http://www.yowling.com. Yowling offers an easy to use web site builder that lets you create a professional website in no time at all for as little as $21 a month.
Comments
26 responses so far ↓
Next Generation Shopping » Blog Archive » Web Services, Duplicate Content, and Search Engine Rankings on May 3, 2006 at 12:59 am
[...] This post from Search Engine Journal from Joe Duchesne back in July of 2005 reveals some interesting details: “[…] Google is concerned about revolves around affiliate programs. It has been common practice for high traffic websites to establish an affiliate program. Affiliate programs themselves don’t worry Google. What it doesn’t like though, is for an affiliate program to take a template and then offer it to its base of affiliates to use. Some of the higher traffic websites end up with thousands upon thousands of duplicate websites all promoting the very same things and, according to Google, not offering any real value to the internet community. A website offering this type of cookie cutter website can easily find themselves de-listed by Google as happened to Template Monster a while back. […]” [...]
PlagiarismToday » Google Addresses Duplicate Content on Dec 21, 2006 at 7:37 pm
[...] SEO gurus often take a great deal of interest in plagiarism and content theft issues out of fear of being hit with the duplicate content penalty. Under such a penalty, Google penalizes sites with identical information by reducing their search ranking and their exposure. [...]
5 Hints to Identify and Resolve Your Duplicate Content Issues » 10e20 - Search, Design & Social on Jun 4, 2007 at 12:49 pm
[...] now, then to fall prey to these filters and get your site stuck in the supplemental index, or worse! Here are some hints to help you identify and eventually reduce duplicate content issues [...]
DevTopics on Jun 5, 2007 at 7:29 pm
[...] to the topic and push your blog further down in the results. There is also the so-called “duplicate content penalty” if the content on your site is duplicated on other Web sites. But with Google’s opacity, [...]
Carson on Jun 6, 2007 at 9:07 am
So what about ezine articles or syndicated articles - do these need to be avaided? I think that there is some utility in compiling syndicated content into one easily accessible site - especially if no other site is doing it on that subject matter.
5 Hints to Identify and Resolve Your Duplicate Content Issues | streaminterviews.com on Jun 9, 2007 at 12:29 pm
[...] now, then to fall prey to these filters and get your site stuck in the supplemental index, or worse! Here are some hints to help you identify and eventually reduce duplicate content issues [...]
Google and DMCA | Bert Vierstra Blog on Aug 2, 2007 at 11:35 pm
[...] Search Engine Journal about Duplicate Content and Ranking [...]
» Hit With a Duplicate Content Penalty? on Nov 22, 2007 at 11:42 pm
[...] it to researching how dramatically having contents that are in duplicate form can be to you ranking.How to Lose Google Ranking Fast Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties We must understand and accept the fact that Google has the [...]
Comment on Duplicate Content Penalty - How to Lose Google Ranking… on Nov 23, 2007 at 12:56 am
[...] Merchant Account Providers added an interesting post on Comment on Duplicate Content Penalty - How to Lose Google Ranking… [...]
azlan on Feb 3, 2008 at 10:05 am
my first time here and this article has made me decided to come back soon for more of your interesting content.. great work..
Azlan
Online Business with a kampung boy
http://www.azlanhussain.com
Andrew on May 11, 2008 at 1:02 pm
One of my blog posts was copied word-by-word. Now the duplicate on the plagiators’ site is ranking higher on Google than the original. Why doesn’t the duplicate content penalty kick in?
Rick on May 18, 2008 at 9:15 am
because google isnt realy that smart. I had the same problem. Someone copied like 50% of the content of a website i made and he got highter on google than my website :(
Duplicate Content Does Not Cause a Penalty on Jun 9, 2008 at 12:16 pm
[...] will cause you penalties and the answer is No. If your not sure what I’m talking about see here and here for a couple examples of writers talking about the duplicate content [...]
» Duplicate Content Penalty - How to Lose Google Ranking Fast on Jun 21, 2008 at 10:39 am
[...] Duplicate Content Penalty - How to Lose Google Ranking Fast (278) [...]
SEO Issues with Duplicate Content: Htaccess, Robots and URLs - Part 1 - Barry Wise NJ SEO and Marketing Consultant on Oct 4, 2008 at 10:02 am
[...] and displays them when users do a query. The rest of them it lumps into a duplicate content black hole, where they are rarely seen or heard from [...]
Domain Structure on Oct 9, 2008 at 10:21 pm
The duplicate content penalty does not exist.. to an extent.
“There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.”
With that being said they also note that such a penalty does exist but only under certain sitations. An example that would get you penalised for duplicate content is as follows.
- If you are caught leaching or scraping information from other sites and republish it without adding any additional value to the information.
- 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.
“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.”
You can read more about it @ http://www.domainstructure.com/2008/09/duplicate-content-penalty/
and also @ http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html
Internet marketing tips on Oct 24, 2008 at 8:02 pm
What about submitting the same article to multiple article locations? Will this result in google seeing that as “duplicate” content?
Small Business Website Marketing on Jan 9, 2009 at 10:36 am
This is a helpful article. I guess it’s best to use eZine articles sparingly and rewrite any private label articles completely?
Alex on Jan 9, 2009 at 3:28 pm
No one has responded to Carsons questions regarding e-zine articles. There are also other websites such as seekingalpha.com which simply recreate the same content published on other blogs but they do add value as they help discover great blogs and authors…
How do they get away from duplicate content penalty
james on Feb 2, 2009 at 1:23 pm
In regards to the duplicate content part of this blog post, I personally use the http://www.copygator.com website to find and stop duplicate content:
1. it’s automated and brings me results instead of me searching for duplicated content. All i had to do was submit my feed and it started monitoring my feed showing me who’s republished my articles on the web.
2. i get notified by email so it contacts me when it finds copies of my articles online.
3. i use their image badge feature to alert me directly on my website when my content is being lifted.
4. it’s a free service as opposed the “per page” cost of copyscape/copysentry.
How To Find Out If Someone Copied Your Website on Mar 9, 2009 at 2:18 pm
[...] lot of people have stated that you’ll get penalized by Google if you publish duplicate content, but other people have stated that you’ll get ranked fairly [...]
Guest Blogging on Mar 20, 2009 at 7:12 am
[...] in a modified way to ensure that both texts are original. The reason for this principle is to avoid search engine punishments to the similar content. A good measure for the originality of the content is a test in Copyscape. If a query of the first [...]
Cris on Mar 26, 2009 at 6:57 am
How to modify page after duplicate content penalty?
Engineering Salesman on Apr 16, 2009 at 8:23 am
Duplicate content is an issue which has concerned me for some while. I put up articles on ezinearticles dot com and some of them have been reproduced widely. I’d like to know if this is hurting my PR. Can anyone tell me
selva on Apr 19, 2009 at 9:24 am
check the duplicate content
pike lures on Jun 30, 2009 at 9:18 am
I found out that my website had 13 duplicated metas. That was “ghost” pages, pages which I had changed the url names. I changed them because i changed title of the page and the url too.I though those pages would disappear but they stayed indexed as “ghost” pages,empty pages without content only template and ads.But the worst thing of all, google added my home meta to all of them,making 13 duplicated pages. I didnt realize it for many months,suffering a huge penalty.
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