The Truth About Duplicate Content

This article is about a very common piece of misinformation, that one can often encounter in online marketing forums. Part of the blame for this misinformation falls to article spinning programs and the way they are being advertised.

The rumor I am talking about is usually referred to as the Google duplicate-content-penalty. Apparently, Google has some kind of an issue with copies of the same content when it finds them spread across several websites or on several pages of a single website. As the rumor goals, if the Google crawlers find this duplicate-content this will trigger some kind of a penalty. On a Side-Note, while I have seen dozens of mentions of the duplicate-content-penalty, I have yet to encounter a description of exact details, explaining what this penalty is and who it is that gets punished.

Don’t worry though, this is all just a baseless rumour. And it can be easily disproved. Let?s take a look at some examples:

Press Releases

Every time the big story breaks and a press release is issued, that story gets picked up by countless news sites. Such stories and press releases are often also picked up by bloggers all across the Internet. Usually, the original text of the press release is republished word by word by most of the sites. Despite all this, news sites and blogs continue existing, unpunished by Google.

Song Lyrics

Have you ever seen how many websites there are, where people can look up lyrics to their favourite songs? And can you imagine how often pieces of famous song-texts are quoted and reproduced on blogs and in discussion forums on the topic of music? In every instance, the song-texts are unchanged and identical, in other words: duplicates. And once again, it’s clear to see that no penalty applies to sites like lyrics databases.

Content Going Viral

Time and time again, some piece of content (perhaps a video or a joke) catches on with a wide audience and start spreading across the web like wildfire. When something goes viral like this, it gets republished and copied hundreds and thousands of times on many different sites. Again, a clear example of duplicate content and no punishment in sight.

Despite this evidence, the myths about the duplicate content penalty are alive and well, and it might be due to a mis-interpretation of the Google search results.

The Misinterpretation

If you search for a piece of content that has numerous duplicates, Google will only display a few of those in the standard search results. You can click the button in the search results to see all of the duplicates listed. The reason for the omission of some duplicates from the search results is that Google strives to display diverse and relevant results. Displaying dozens or hundreds of duplicate entries would not be very useful for the person doing the search. However, the sites that are not being listed are still indexed by Google and links from those sites still ?count?, so there is no actual penalty in play.

The problem is that it’s in the interest of many producers of article spinning tools to keep the duplicate content myth alive. Fear sells and if you believe that you must spin and rewrite any content you want to distribute or suffer punishment from the big G, you are more likely to make a purchase.

Article spinning and tools and programs that help you do it does have it’s purposes and it can be very beneficial for online marketing. But a mythical penalty from Google has nothing to do with it.

Gain realistic information in the sphere of one way links – please make sure to read the web site. The time has come when concise information is truly within your reach, use this possibility.

Tags: article spinning