How does Google see duplicate Content? Is there a Penalty?
Thursday, August 27, 2009 23:21
Many webmasters are anxious to know the number of people who trust the rumor that Google will penalize your site for sharing content belonging to some other site.
It seems to be doing the rounds and for quite a while now, though little of it seems to be true.
Inspite of Google declaring that there was no such thing as a content duplication penalty, web surfers still believe it to be so. One has to realize that if the mighty ‘Google’ makes a statement, it surely must be true.
As far as people’s ignorance and misunderstandings are concerned, take a look at the image below. I found it at a website of an affiliate marketer trying to sell a product which promises SEO miracles. lol.
Coming back to the topic, in the case of duplicate content, the results are filtered from the search engines. However, it is indexed, so you just have to click once again to see what’s there.
This sure is capable of raising doubts, but it is necessary to keep in mind that a penalty for content duplication is just a piece of fiction.
If there are 2 sites having same content, Google will discharge one of the pages from its index, but the site does not receive a penalty. The page is dropped because it has previously been indexed on another site. However, if the site totally contains only duplicate content, then it may receive a penalty.
An example could be a blog which was noticed a while back – it had nothing but duplicate content. It possessed a type of script setup to take Rss feeds from sites like yahoo and convert them into its own pages. The owner had about 200,000 pages of copied content indexed with Google. However, this was shortlived as Google detected the site and scrapped it from the index. This actually meant that Google banned the site. All the pages was removed from Google’s index, and even a search for the domain name didn’t return anything.
It has been observed that many a time, someone might purchase a database with 1,000 articles on it and use it to start their site, but such a database has been used so often that Google will not index the newer sites.
Loading ...
Music Producer says:
September 25th, 2009 at 11:21 PM
Interesting article. I’ve been plagiarised twice. My website text was copied once, by a recording studio. Then I rewrote the entire site – and then someone else (some other music producer) copied the new text – word by word!
I was told that Google penalises websites that copy others. But I was wondering if the reverse could be true? Say for example, you are the original creator – and then some 10, 20, hundreds of people steal your text (or in the case of a blogger – your article!). Could Google decide to reward you (after doing it’s round of penalising others)?
If there is such an algo – then being plagiarised can be a good thing. And the best policy is to just then smile and remain quiet.