A Simple Guide to Duplicate Content. Are These 2 Myths Holding Your Traffic Back?

If you’ve ever worked with a search engine optimization professional, or if you’ve worked to optimize your website on your own, you’ve probably heard the term duplicate content.

It can be terrifying. You usually hear it about it like this. Something you’ve done, or something that your web publishing tool – think WordPress – has done, is causing some of your content to show up at different URLs within your website.

Or even worse, content you originally posted on your website is now being displayed on some other website. You might not even know who runs the other website. Your content was stolen.

If any of this sounds familiar, you have a duplicate content problem.

The search engines will quickly penalize your website to the ends of the Internet. If your site is currently ranking on the 1st page of the search results, you might quickly become a candidate for our next BoostSuite Page 10 award.

If you don’t fix this immediately, your site could disappear from the search engine results entirely.

But wait, I have good news. None of this is actually true.

Luckily for marketers Google has taken a very common sense approach to handling duplicate content on the Internet. I think you’ll find it very reasonable and very easy to understand once you learn the details.

Think about the challenge from Google’s perspective.

A web searcher searches for a keyword and Google finds 15 different website pages that have content related to that topic. But, as it turns out, all of those pages have the exact same content.

There’s no need to return all 15 different pages, so Google has to decide which pages to return. If you were running Google, which pages would you return?

You would probably try to determine which page was actually the original, or which page was the most popular with previous visitors who searched for the same keyword.

Good idea. In fact, that’s exactly how Google does it too.

Duplicate Content Myth Number #1:

Your website will be penalized if someone steals some of your content and uses it on their website.

This is simply not true.

Google has publicly stated that there is NO SUCH THING as a duplicate content penalty. If another website steals your original content, nothing negative will happen to your website.

Here’s why. When you first posted your original content online, Google’s regular systems for finding and reading new web content kicked in and found your page. The content, being original, was tagged as being yours, and yours alone.

As the original author Google gives you credit for creating that content. If the content shows up elsewhere across the web those websites will be given less credit for the content, because they aren’t the original authors.

But, and here is the important part, your page’s reputation will remain unfettered.

That said. It is possible that an Internet searcher would be served one of these other pages instead of yours, if Google feels that the content is more appropriate to them.

Google uses many methods for deciding the best page for each individual user. A simple example might be that one of the searcher’s social media connections recently shared or liked one of the alternate versions of your content.

If you’re highly concerned about your content getting stolen, try a service like Copyscape that scours the web and finds your content wherever it might run off to at any time.

If you know your content has been pilfered already, try calling them out via Google’s process for enforcing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Duplicate Content Myth Number #2:

Your website will be penalized if the same piece of content appears at two different URLs on your website.

Again, this is simply untrue.

This one is just more of a misunderstanding. Let me clarify.

This is actually pretty common if you think about it. Especially in automated publishing platforms like blogs and forums.

It’s quite common for WordPress to show a recent blog post on its index (home) page and allow you to click to read the full blog post on its own page too. If the full blog text appears on both pages, this is duplicate content within your website.

Once again, Google has made it clear that your website will not be penalized when this happens.

What does actually happen is that any search reputation that your site had already built for the content, will be split across all instances of that content on your website.

So if the content appears on three different pages, and it has formerly had a search reputation of 10 (made up number simply for illustration purposes), each of those three pages will have a reputation of 3.33.

Another page on your website that isn’t duplicated that previously had a reputation of 10, would continue to have a reputation of 10.

So, you see, your website isn’t penalized, but the duplicated content’s reputation does get watered down.

Google offers some great tips for avoiding this situation entirely, if you care.

“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.”

So within your website there is no downside to having this duplicate content. Google will just pick the page they like most. Problem solved.

But, consider how your duplicated pages will fare against other pages on the Internet.

When online searchers look for content on the topic discussed in your duplicated article, each of your pages on the topic only have a reputation of 3.33. Any other page online with a higher reputation is more likely to get served up first.

That’s not great.

If you fix your duplicated content you can actually restore the search reputation of the primary version of the article to 10, increasing the likelihood that it will obtain a higher search ranking.

This is typically done by using a technique to force the reputation for the copied pages to zero, thus transferring their reputation back to the primary version of the article.

So, what do you think?

Is duplicate content still as scary as you thought it was? Will you get to work fixing your duplicate content, or will you leave it alone and move on to higher priorities like creating great new content for your website?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Image via Flickr

A Simple Guide to Duplicate Content. Are These 2 Myths Holding Your Traffic Back?