SEO: Duplicate content?
July 28th, 2008You may have heard from your search engine optimization consultant that duplicate content is a no-no in the search engine ranking game - but what does this really mean? How strict are search engines in terms of duplicate content?
Let’s first consider the types of duplicate content that a webmaster might post on his or her website. Direct quotes, from articles or speakers, are a pretty common form of duplicate content but we wouldn’t expect to be penalized for this type of content, especially if it is properly credited. Online yellow pages and directories contain mostly business names, addresses, and phone numbers - not original content by any means - and yet somehow these sites get indexed and ranked by search engines as well. And how about online news sites that reproduce stories from the AP wire - these posts are IDENTICAL to content posted on hundreds of other sites yet there doesn’t seem to be any “penalty” applied to the local news sites.
So perhaps the search engines have written special rules to deal with this type of content - but I really doubt it. Instead I think search engines don’t expect web pages to be completely unique but they prefer pages that are MOSTLY unique. What constitutes a MOSTLY unique page versus a not-unique-enough page is certainly a mystery but if I were writing a search alogorithm I’d want to see the ratio of unique to duplicate content at about 1 to 1.
Applying a penalty to non-unique sites can also pose a challenge because search engines don’t always know which site posted the content first (i.e. who the owner is). If a plaigerizer copies your content within a day of posting it on your website, the search crawlers have a good chance of finding your content on his site first and thus applying the “penalty” to your site even though you did nothing wrong. Again, this leads me to believe the duplicate content penalty is a myth because it’s just too difficult to enforce fairly and accurately.
In our own search engine tests of duplicate content we found that two pages, each with identical content (title tags, content, markup, etc.), posted on the same domain, were both indexed by the major search engines. The only difference between the files was the filenames and the resulting search engine listing randomly placed one file as a part of “supplemental results.” Since both files were created at the same time the choice of “supplemental” versus “original” was complete chance.
The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t stress about original content on your website. Sure, you should never copy content from other sites but that’s because you’ll eventually receive nasty-grams accusing you of plaigerism - not because the search engines will start to hate you. Just use duplicate content judiciously and keep increasing your (mostly) unique pages to watch your search traffic soar!
