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I’ve recently being speaking to a couple of clients who’ve heard various rumours that duplicating their content around the web will get them penalized by Google, and they’ll lose their rankings.
There’s a lot of confusion around duplicate content to the extent that business owners worry about that any content they reproduce or recycle may succumb to the wrath of Google, but this is so untrue!
Businesses who are genuinely trying to promote themselves by showing off their expertise around the web (also known as ‘marketing’), need not worry about duplicate content issues. These days, search engines have sophisticated algorithms and they can quite easily work out the source of the content. The worst that could happen is that the search engine may favour the same article or blog post on one website over another, which isn’t really a disadvantage anyway! The advantage of passing your work around the web is that not only do you get your name more widely known, you also get links back to your site from those websites who are happy to display your content.
Google and the other search engines are far more worried about businesses who are blatantly trying to spam the search engines, trick the search engines in some way and use underhand techniques to promote themselves. If you use any techniques that try to exploit their algorithms (the way they rank websites) then your rankings may well suffer! Google displays guidelines for webmasters on it’s website, which you can read here:
Webmaster Guidelines and here: Duplicate Content
Jill Whalen, a leading internet marketer, also recently wrote an article about duplicate content, which is well worth a read!
About Sam
Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.
Thank you for clarifying this and providing the link to the article by Jill Whalen!
Glad you found the post useful, it seems to be something that a lot of people get confused about!
This article is spot on. I have been having this dilemma recently as I am being requested to write more things and being published in the on-line press. The link though does seem to suggest there are still some penalties for duplicating information. Is it best to have a base version of, say an article, and then change the intro and end? If so I am still puzzled as to how much changing needs to happen to be considered “original” are we talking 10%, or 10 words in a 250 word article (2.5%)?
Louise Reynolds
Hi Louise
You don’t need to change the article if you’re going to distribute it around the web, so no need to worry about that. The article by Jill Whalen just suggests that you make sure you don’t have too many duplicate pages on your site, particularly if using sites such as WordPress where duplications can happen if a post is listed in more than one category etc. Really, don’t worry about distributing the same content, the more people see it the better for you, plus with the biography at the bottom of your article, you should get more links back to your site!