Google Duplicate Content "Penalty" Myth

[ke6hts]

Hi everyone,

Here is a video from Google that was posted on their YouTube Webmaster Channel that is well worth watching. The first thing covered is that duplicate content is not penalized per se. This information is presented by the speaker who gave a talk about this on August 12, 2009, so it is pretty much up to date.

Take a look at the video for "the rest of the story":

YouTube - Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues

Marvin

[Shawn!]

I want to tell you thank you so much for posting this.

I have come across "the penalty is a myth" articles before, but could not substantiate the claim. And when I search the 30dc forum there are tons of posts that talk about the "penalty," so it is still widely misunderstood.

So here is my question: A 30DC posted this list of article directories:

Top 25 Article Directories! Get to Postin

If there is no penalty, then can we take an article (different than one on our blog) and post it to each of these 25 directories? Doing so, would be no different that 25 different websites syndicating our article from ezinearticles.

24 of the 25 pages will be eventually hidden by Google when they say "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries."

However, in the meantime as Google sorts it out we have additional backlinks and traffic, our site should rank higher, and we save a ton of time, while providing a quality article to 25 different sites they can use.

Here is the initial article that got me thinking about this. How to Write Articles: Aspects of the Google Duplicate Content Penalty


Shawn

[ke6hts]

I haven't done article marketing per se yet as my keywords rank on the first page of Google anyway.

But don't confuse no duplicate content penalty with it being okay to post duplicate articles. If Google only selects one article to pay attention to (as the others are just duplicates), you've kind of wasted your time posting multiple articles unless it is just an effort to get more eyeballs as it won't help your link building campaign. And after all, link building is one of the primary objectives to writing articles and thus helping to get to the first page of the SERPS.

Marvin

[ShaneS]

This is a good topic that many are concerned with.

Here's my 2 cents:

As far as article marketing goes, the main thing you want to avoid is adding duplicate content throughout your different sites. And when it comes to using a particular article to add to directories and such, just be sure you spin 'em.

I have a great article spinner that I use and it saves me from the worry of being penalized(even tho it may be a myth)... .

Thanks for posting about this. I know a few people that have different opinions about it that I'll share these videos with.

Thanks Again,

Shane"Cominback"Schimpf

[benHammer]

Hi Shane,

woud you mind telling us the name of your article spinner?

Thank you all for this topic, very very interesting.

Ben

[jimmyrose]

I used to sit there and add jetspinner syntax to every article, but I stopped caring out of laziness at one point and now just submit the same article repeatedly.

I submit my articles to about 10 of the top 20 (the other 10 get done by the next step) and use software to post to a hundred or so. One run will see around 10 backlinks show up in google in 2-3 weeks. I'm only usually doing it for the backlinks so it seems to work.

My Conclusion: Myth

[EdW]

A suggestion:

skip to about 2:45 on the youtube video - where they talk about "spam" duplicate content.

My personal interpretation of this video is:

Duplicate content is not "penalized"

Duplicate content appearing on multiple sites pointing to the same site is not necessarily "bonused" either, and that too many repeat copies of the same article water down the value it has in any sort of bonus, possibly to the point where having 100 of the exact same articles pointing to the main site is less of a "bonus" than having 5 unique articles from good sources.

More info on this topic also at Duplicate content - Webmaster Tools Help (Google Webmaster advice)