Duplicate Content: Penalty or Policy?

What is duplicate content? Will Google penalize for duplicate content?

If you copy and republish someone’s article, will you get punished? or at worst, anger the God of Google?

Everyone is confused and worried about the duplicate content penalty.

According to search engine land, one of the most trusted voices in the business of search engine optimization, it’s overhyped. It’s one of the most prevalent misnomer being bandied about.

We are schooled and made to believe that there is a penalty for republishing dupe contents where in fact, there is no such thing as duplicate content penalty. It is a policy more than a penalty.

Being the dominant search engine, such a policy by Google is necessary to police and maintain the quality of its search index. One that is free from search engines spams that are commonly referred to as low-quality pages with little value to people, created solely for search engine rankings.

What is Duplicate Content?

From the horse mouth, here what Google says

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.

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.

What Justin Brooke says?

Nothing bad can happen to anyone, there is no secret scoreboard where people are losing Google points for dupe contents. Unless, it’s done with  the intent to manipulate the search engines.

In this video below, Justin Brooke from SiteFling.com demystifies one of the SEO misconceptions and shares with us his thoughts on duplicate contents penalty.

So is it a penalty or policy?

Watch the video below and you’ll get the whole story. You’ll love this BIG guy as much as I do.

SEO Lies – What the SEO gurus don’t want you to know about!

If that isn’t enough, I highly recommend a 34-page ebook by Justin Brooke called SEO Lies – A Report About SEO Truth.

In this ebook, he debunks the most popular SEO myths and tell you almost everything you need to know about SEO.

For a measly $1, yes one dollar, you can learn everything you need to know about SEO from one of the great internet marketers, Justin Brooke and uncover the hidden truth.

If you are new to the concept of SEO, do yourself a big favor, go and get it. It could well be the best $1 you’ve ever spent online. You don’t get stuffs like this for a dollar everyday.

Thanks, Brian for the heads up.

Conclusion

Google is working very hard to maintain its search results as unique as possible using a complex algorithm and in order to do so, it creates a ‘filter’ to weed out any articles considered non-unique, or what we often refer to as duplicate content. In most cases, it doesn’t.

Let me give you one great example of duplicate contents where both pages appears on the search results, though one ranks higher than the other. Well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which one.

1. SEO Tips for Beginners
2. Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery.

Suffice to say, there isn’t a penalty here. In fact, the more sites that publish my article, the more credibility I have in the eyes of Google.

So is it a penalty or policy?

In rare cases, Google will perceive your dupe contents as an intent to manipulate its ranking and ignore your contents, in which case it will remove them from the index and no longer appear in search results. But that doesn’t equal to penalty – it’s just a filter.

In closing, I’m not here with an intent to advocate the use of duplicate contents. Unique contents no doubt stand a better chance of ranking higher in the search engines results. I’m merely proving to you that duplicate content has been and always will be a natural part of the web so get over it.

What do you say?

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