Why Google Categorically Cannot Penalise You for Duplicate Content
It’s obvious that Google, and other search engines for that matter, do not want duplicated content in their index and in their SERPS. If all their search results led to the same regurgitated copy, this would offer users very little value and they would go else ware. Thus, Google take the issue of dupe content very seriously and invest a hell of a lot of time and money ridding it from their system. However, regardless of what you may have read or heard, Google will not and cannot penalise you for having duplicate content on your site, here’s why -
In general there are two forms of duplicate content:
1.) Duplicate content on different domains – caused by content theft, article syndication, press release distribution etc.
2.) Onsite duplicate content – caused by having the same content on multiple URLs, intentionally or otherwise.
Google cannot penalise you for having content on your site that can be found else ware for one simple reason – it cannot know for sure which is the original. Now Google is not stupid and it’s gotten very good at taking educated guesses about which content deservers to be given the ‘original’ stamp and be included in the rankings, but it cannot be 100% sure, and therefore cannot dish out a penalty.
Let’s say for example you start a blog and write on it every day about how the flowers in your garden are getting along. You don’t have very many backlinks and no site power, but you’re a good writer and enjoy sharing your stories. Now the owner of a far more powerful site than yours comes along, likes your content and decides to use it on their own blog. This site has thousands of backlinks and is crawled many times a day by search engines, so the stolen content is found first on this secondary site and for all intents and purposes the original content now looks like it’s the duplicate version. Google might display the stolen version in the SERPS, and this would be unfortunate, but it won’t slap the weaker original site with a penalty because it cannot be sure it has done anything wrong.
Now the point above has actually been stated by Google themselves and a great many SEOs have backed this up since. However, what a lot of people are still unclear about is the second form of duplicate content – that which resides on your own site. Well, the idea of getting a penalty for this is a myth also. Let me explain -
People were building websites long before Google (or BackRub as it was once known) came on the scene. Google had to play catch up and learn how to interpret all the various types of sites that used different coding, different links and different ways of displaying content etc. Amazingly now a great many web designers and developers build sites with Google in mind, based on what, over the years, Google have said they liked. However, as the internet continues to expand rapidly, there are more website variations than ever before, including sites have all their content on one URL, are completely Flash-based, and you guessed it – have lots of duplicate content.
Whilst Google might of course favour certain website structures and give preference to these in their search results, there is no way they would slap a penalty on a site simply because it doesn’t conform to their ‘recommended standards’. They again say this themselves quite explicitly. As a last point Google does hint at the fact that malicious duplicate content can cause a penalty when they say –
“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.”
However, interpreting ‘deceit’ and ‘manipulation’ is a very difficult thing for a robot to do as they both stem from ‘intent’ – which is not a black and white thing in itself. Essentially the only way Google could be confident enough to actually ‘penalise’ a website (which is very different than devaluing certain areas of it) is to review sites manually. Since the number of websites online is increasing by around 20 million every year, Google better get recruiting if it wants to use up all those penalty stickers it’s got lying around.
Some may disagree with the last point here, and that’s OK, but I’d be very interested if anyone can provide an example of a site receiving an ‘actual penalty’ as a result of hosting duplicate content on their site?
D.Heath is the manager of Extreme Sports Trader – an action sports price comparison site reviewing everything from Roxy luggage for your vacation, to Animal flip flips for the summer. He is a keen Internet marketer and tries to stay on top of the ever-changing SEO world.
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16 Responses to “Why Google Categorically Cannot Penalise You for Duplicate Content”
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Great Article!!! Does Google Penalize you for Submitting Articles that are on your site to Article Directories?
What point are you arguing? Google won’t penalise you so it’s open season. Terrific! There are a couple of sites with great content that I’ve always fancied. Now with your permission I can happily “borrow” some of it and not worry about duplicate content penalties.
I don’t think so.
I don’t agree with your assessment of the Google articles. Google state “There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty” but they immediately follow it with “At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.”
I take this to mean that duplicate content assessment is somewhere in the ranking algorithm, in which all factors contribute to the ranking for the site. Or put it another way duplicate content won’t have you removed from the index (what most people would consider a penalty) but it won’t help your ranking. If you put effort into cultivating duplicate content and get no reward, this might seem like a penalty.
Google acknowledge there are some situations where a strict analysis of a site might suggest duplicate content (e.g. multiple URLs pointing to the same content), but they are able to recognise these situations and handle them without negative impact for the site.
However, they also state “Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you’ve been duplicating deliberately, it’s unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty.” Perhaps an unfortunate use of the word penalty, when they are arguing no penalty exists.
There are a few issues raised by that last quote from Google. Here are 2 thoughts that I had:
- You could be penalised for deliberately trying to mislead Google through the scammy use of duplicate content. The penalty is for scamming not for duplicate content. The duplicate content is only the method.
- The impact of even minor breaches can be hard to identify and the impact may be felt on pages other than the duplicate content pages. Consider the multiple URL case. If Google only devote a certain amount of bandwidth / time to your site and they find the same content multiple times via different URLs, isn’t it possible some of your other pages may not be found on the current visit, thus delaying their appearance in the index. This is not a formal penalty but it is having a negative impact on your site.
We are talking about an environment where every factor plays a role and the relative place in the index can impact on the bottom line. Our job is to eliminate every negative we can control. I still think duplicate content is one of those factors.
‘Deceit’ and ‘manipulation’ are difficult to assess but that doesn’t mean Google isn’t doing it and that they won’t continue to get better at it. I’m not prepared to take on this risk.
Please use “elsewhere” instead of “else ware”, it drives our spellchecker nuts
I think it’s important to recall that there is a great difference between a penalty, a dampener and a filter. The author is quite clearly referring to “penalties”. While many of us might feel that a dampener or filter make us FEEL as though we’ve been penalized, that doesn’t mean that’s what has happened.
Ok, honestly you are talking about so many things at a time which is making me confused where to start.
let me start with the article title… you use ‘cannot’ do consider the factor of ‘should not’ lets suppose if i agree that Google cannot penalized (i somewhat agree) duplicate content this is your duty not to mess or at least you should not mess with the search engine.
now, one of the commenter about is very right Google itself says there is no such thing as Duplicate content penalty but he is right ‘You could be penalized for deliberately trying to mislead Google through the scammy use of duplicate content.’
In short if you are playing a long game and have long term strategy in mind the use of duplicate content on your website specially from other websites can be very dangerous
else ware??????
I hope later Google can identify whose website is writing the original content and the one who take time to duplicate some content posted on other blog or website. And those who duplicate most be
Nice article with some good information. My understanding of this has always been that Google simply doesn’t want the exact same article or post appearing in the search results many times. So it chooses one, hopefully the original and the syndicated articles add to the chosen ones rank.
It sounds there is no chance for innovative content to come on top page of google, who are already coming in top they may still ur content and it may effect origional site to pull back
Thats a good post!
It’s not really hard to make a robots.txt to disallow indexing of some pages and make your site much clearer.
Interesting article. This is the best article thus far explaining duplicate content. Thanks for your point of view.
Excelent post. I can see good explanning about duplicate content. God Bless you
Baz? ?eyler sadece ?a??rt?c? ve bizim için büyük ve karma??k bir s?n?r? varsa, ben ne teknoloji s?n?r bilmiyorum!
hi very nice post
my problem is that i have two websites
sikandrastonecraft.com and sikandrastonecraft.org
the latter one is my new site while .com one is my previous site
they are both registered with same name
my question is that will google penalize me if i copy over the exactly same content from my previous site?
as i will be removing my previous site after sometime
pls reply
This is not good. Google should find a way of knowing who writes what first to avoid this stealing of content all over the the internet. It should be able to ensure that for any site that has put up a new post there is no other post like that which exists online.
This will give people who like to steal other peoples work such a good time. I think Google should come with measures to know which content goes first online and ensure that there is no other content that looks like that.