2008/09/26

The TRUTH about Google Dublicate Content Penalty

Webmasters worry a lot about duplicate content, the fear of Google penalties seems to be a never ending discussion and all kinds of techniques are used to avoid this. Google recently published an article about this hoping to clarify their policy and put and end to the discussion.

The article "Demystifying the duplicate content penalty" by Susan Moskwa, states that Google don't penalize duplicate content the way people think they are. The article actually confirms what most of us already know from the Webmaster Guidelines; Google fancy uniqueness and its unwise to scrape content and republish it on your web site. But, if you add some value like rewriting it, or add something "new and valuable" to the text content - then its accepted. Below are a few more "rules" you should keep in mind:

Do not create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with similar or duplicate content - guess this is pretty obvious to everyone.

Avoid cookie cutter approaches like affiliate programs with little or no original content Meaning. the same web site is found "all over" the net and your site don't represent any value to the users -watch out for turn key solutions.

Make sure your web site provides relevant and valuable content if you participate in an affiliate program. There is nothing wrong with affiliate links on your web pages as long as the content is unique and adds value.

Generally Google tolerates pretty much before penalizing a site or web page as long as its not designed to mislead users or manipulate the search engines. But be aware of that duplication might weaken the strength of an URL or Web site.

When Google discover duplicate content generated by default by CMS, Google put these pages in a cluster and pick out the URL they find most relevant and consolidate this URL using for instance Pagerank. This "cluster URL" will be shown in the Search Engine results page (SERP).

Susan Moskwas distinct article clarifies many of the frequent questions Webmasters have about duplicate content. We encourage you to read it carefully and follow the links in the article for more in depth info - you find it at Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Source: Google Webmaster Central - kindly provided by Article Promotion Journal

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