For years, the major search engines like Google and Yahoo! have been fighting a battle with scurrilous webmasters and website builders against spam and search engine manipulation. Surely you have heard some stories of both guilty and innocent parties whose websites were banned from Google because of deceptive practices. The search engines continuously update their search algorithms to weed out and punish those who try to manipulate their system.
While those to try to stuff unrelated keywords into their web pages or employ deceptive practices in their web page content will eventually find their due justice with search engines, many innocent web owners are concerned about duplicate content on their sites.
We’re here to clear the myth about duplicate content. Duplicate content is not spam. It is not a deceptive SEO practice. It is not keyword stuffing. Duplicate content is simply identical or nearly identical content found on your website or on other website domains. Duplicate content is not penalized; it is merely filtered.
What is Duplicate Content?
Say for instance that you write an SEO article and post it to your company website blog. Then you also submit your article to other article databases. Your duplicate article may be found by search engines during a routine search for keywords you included in the article. However, instead of listing each and every one of the articles found on the internet, the search engine will most likely filter out the duplicate content and list only the most pertinent link on its results page.
You may also have duplicate content on your own domain under different URLs. If at all possible, see that each of your web pages contain unique content and do not have the same full information twice.
Some third party software may be guilty of duplicating URLs, particularly WordPress. WordPress allows users to include tags and categories for the posts they create. However, multiple tags and categories in the same post can cause WordPress create multiple URLs depending which tag or category is clicked by a user.
For instance, if you write an article about dog training and tag it with keywords like “dog training” and “dog handling,” WordPress might create two separate web pages for each of those tags.
Why do Search Engines Filter Duplicate Content?
The search engines simply want to provide the most relevant and unique results for a search. Rather than list an entire results page with links to your identical article found on multiple domains, your article may be listed only once along with additional links to other relevant information. This helps give their search clients the best available information in the smallest space possible.
Search engine algorithms are sophisticated and are typically able to determine when a particular URL’s content is duplicated elsewhere. While your duplicated web content may be simply weeded out by search engines, you are safe in the knowledge that it is not a penalty against you for using spamming or other deceptive SEO techniques.
