Duplicate content (good or bad?)

December 3, 2007

For writers such as myself it makes sense that I want as many people as possible to read what I have to say. The first way to do this is to get my site and my content ranked well on Google for valid searches that I write about. The second way is to syndicate my content and share it across many partner sites in the hope that someone will stumble upon it, read it, follow the link to my main site in the footer and possibly bookmark and continue to read my main body of content.

I’ve heard some discussion about duplicate content lately and I wanted to set the record straight here about what Google thinks about a writer distributing content to other sites. The issue here is this - Google does NOT want their users to do a search and get links to the same content in the results. They want a varied list of options so the user can choose and get as many links as possible to multiple sources. This makes so much sense in my mind that I’m surprised that I had to even research it.

What’s important to know is that Google does NOT penalize your site for having duplicate content. Google understands the reasons for duplicate content and services like newspapers and magazines have done this for a very long time. They also realize that duplicate content can sometimes be out of your control. I used to work for one of the largest newspaper publishers in the country and they would always repub articles on their site and in the newspaper as the Associated Press. In fact, the New York Times articles were duplicated across the entire network of newspaper sites. Below is a summary of Google’s thoughts on this issue:

Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show if your sites includes duplication. If you don’t want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead.
Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.
Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.

The last item on the list is a concern though. Obviously our goal here is to get people to read our content but as this is a site about SEO we must be concerned as well with the issue of links to our content. I’m sure there are many opinions on this issue and I’d like to hear them in the comments below. But in my opinion, I really don’t care which article receives the most links and ranks higher. In a perfect world I’d hope that Google decides to rank the article on my main site. Obviously it’s a concern if my article on the main site falls into the supplemental index too but the issue remains that my content is still ranking high somewhere and I have a clear link in that content back to my main site.

Ideally what we should do is post our content on one site and not distribute to partner sites or syndicate. But we all live in the real world and there is real value in distributing your content with a link back to your site. More content + more locations = larger distribution = more links and traffic back to your main site. Since Google does not penalize you for this practice I would say “go for it”. I’m going to be watching this issue into the future though. With the rise of huge article directories and the like, I’m guessing that Google will (or has already) figured out that a link from content back to a site with the same content on it is not good and therefore will not consider this link in your Pagerank and overall rank in the results. So distribution of content in the future will not affect your ranking and you’ll be left with the value of the link in the article that resolves back to your site. Value indeed.