Google Duplicate Content Penalty

Article: Google Duplicate Content Penalty

The “Duplicate Content Penalty.” It sounds like some complex legal term, doesn’t it? Its consequences may be just as serious to you as a blogger. This penalty is applied by Google and possibly other search engines when content found on your blog/website is reproduced from another site/blog.

Regardless of whether you own the other site, you will still be penalized.

If you are importing articles from one site to another, it is best not to republish these articles until you have deleted the article from the original source site and its results are no longer being displayed in Google Search

Google is not your friend. They have a business to run and a low tolerance for webmaster impropriety. Your goal is to fall well below Google’s radar. Maintain your blog’s creative expression and independence, but do it in a way that does not conflict with Google Search (or Google AdSense).

Since the inception of the World Wide Web, it has been targeted by every slick internet marketer, social media marketer, schemer, scammer, splogger, and spammer. It’s a tense, ongoing challenge by search engines (Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, and Ask) to provide the most relevant, informative results from their keyword searches.

In the past, receiving high search rank (or SERP Rank) was as easy as duplicating keywords or duplicating content. Search engines have become more dynamic preventing this from occurring, say, outside of a few odd exceptions.

Affiliate Sites

As with many of the affiliate sites online, once you register, set up your profile, and review what type of advertising strategies you intend to incorporate, the next step is their resources section. Here, page after page of content is ready to be downloaded (typically WordPress-friendly templates) as template pages that can reconstructed under your new (affiliate-motivated) URL. If there were 2-3 of you, it would be competitive. But imagine hundreds of affiliates doing the same thing! Now when you perform a keyword search with terms directly related to the topic of these template pages, you could see hundreds of other sites with content completely identical in nature.

Your site’s effectiveness is undermined when duplicate content is omitted from Google Search results.

Creative Blogging / Creative Writing

No blogger can avoid the fact that much of what we do is pure writing. Content must be consistent (in clarity and quality), engaging, informative, and entertaining.

The undertaking of a new blog is an enormous task, simply out of the sheer task of generating content over a period of years and months.

As a result of this, there is a temptation to copy someone else’s body of work.

In closing, duplicate content will do very little to enhance your online credibility and identity. Should you avoid all duplicate content completely? It sounds like a safe practice, but is that goal realistic?

Recommended Reading:

What are Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?

Google AdSense Program Policies