Yes, another article about duplicate content, I know, you guys may want to strangle me right now, but there is so much hype and misconception out there about duplicate content and the duplicate content Google slap that I just had to go there and since Google blogged about it last week, I figured now is the perfect time!

Over and over duplicate content is mistaken and distorted into something it isn’t. Some of the biggest myths are about article marketing and duplicate content. One of the biggest article marketing secrets seems to be the truth about duplicate content and article marketing because the BS just keeps propagating on the web.

ARTICLES AND DUPLICATE CONTENT – FACT AND MYTH

MYTH: You have to use some article spinner software, to change your articles around or you will get slapped by Google for submitting the same article to different article sites.

FACT: Totally UNTRUE and doesn’t even make sense. I can and do all the time, submit the same article to thousands of sites and they always show up in search results for the keywords, some rank higher than others, depending on the article site, but they will all be there.

MYTH: Google will slap you for submitting the same article to different article sites.

FACT: Umm, okay how would they do this? In reality, logistically there is no way that Google can penalize the author even if they wanted to, which they don’t.

If, in reality, Google penalized for duplicate articles the logic would follow that G would have to penalize the article sites for publishing the duplicates and that would mean that there would be no article sites left since they often feature the same article submitted by the same author that is also published on other sites.

And, then would it also follow that if same articles were considered duplicate content, the millions of sites that syndicate and disburse articles and news feeds, such as that from the Associated Press, would have been banned long ago.

FACT: Duplicate Content has nothing to do with the submitting the same article. Duplicate content refers to the significantly noticeable duplicated content within the SAME domain or across multiple domains.

THE REAL MEANING OF DUPLICATE CONTENT

Really there are two forms of duplicate content, the malicious and non malicious types.

Non-Malicious Duplicate Content

Same exact content repeated across the same domain, usually because of the CMS design and without malicious intent by the webmaster.

1. Same content across the same domain, such as such as two versions of the same page, for example, a readable and print version on a website.

2. Blogs – By design blogs and CMS apps generate duplicate content, such as the same content falling under archives, tags and new posts listed on the home page.

Both of the above can be handled by indicating on your robots.txt file to block the search engine from crawling and indexing those pages.

Example of Robots.txt commands:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /tags/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /print page/

Learn more ways to address such non malicious duplicate content on your sites at GWT on Fixing Duplicate Content Issues.

“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”
-Google Webmaster Tools

Malicious Duplicate Content – The Real Penalty

Malicious duplicate content is the true culprit and WILL suffer a duplicate content penalty and basically applies to: Substantially same content placed on multiple pages, subdomains, or multiple domains to deliberately manipulate the search engine rankings, and get more traffic.

Last week Google posted a very comprehensive post about duplicate content on their Webmaster Central Blog that will hopefully crush the myths forever and end the constant barage of hype that exists about duplicate content, read it at: Demystifying the Duplicate Content Penalty

What do you guys think? Sick of duplicate content yet?