Duplicate Content Penalty

If you’ve read up on search engine optimization and article marketing, you’ve almost certainly come across some discussion about the Google “duplicate content penalty”. The official statement from the side of Google on this matter is very clear: There is no duplicate content penalty. In spite of this, the rumors about this alleged penalty are still about and ever-present. In this article, I want to offer a possible explanation for why this particular myth is such a pervasive one.

 
“Incomplete” Search Listings?
A possible cause for some misunderstandings pertaining the dupe-content penalty may have to do with something that happens quite often in the search results: When you type in a search query, you’ll often get a small link below a result that you can click to see more results. When you click it, you’ll see some more listings from the same domain as the result above or, in some cases, some more listings of identical content pages. Google does omit listing certain pages from the normal search results. Typically, you’ll only ever find a maximum of two entries from the same domain and a maximum of two entries from different domains, but with identical content. When this happens, you’ll always see the two listings and the link below, that indicates more listings are present, but not displayed. While pages are missing from the results, this is clearly not a penalty of any kind.

If you write an article and submit it to a dozen different article directories, unrevised, you’ll get a similar result when you do a search for it: The results will typically list your article on one or two directories, followed by the option to show more of the results that are hidden, because they are identical.

The important point here is that this is not a penalty. While pages are missing from the results, all those pages are still indexed and only a click away from being displayed. The pages are also all flowing pagerank etc.

Obviously, the pages won’t all get listed in the results, because who would want to find several pages of the same article as a result for a search query?

Article Rewriting
So, what about article spinning? If there’s no dupe-content penalty, can we throw away all of those spinner programs? Not at all. Although the ads for such programs often get it wrong as well: “You must spin your articles, otherwise Google will punish you!” – maybe less dramatic than that, but you get the idea.In reality, article spinning does have a purpose and it can be very useful – it’s just not about avoiding some non-existant penalty. The point of article spinning is to get lots of different content published and this content can catch more long-tail traffic for you. If you write an article, apply some spinning to it and then submit it to a few dozen or even several hundred directories, you’ll have lots and lots of randomized sequences of words floating about online. Just by pure chance, someone will, from time to time, do a search for a string of words present in one of your article-variations, find said article and maybe follow the links within. This is long-tail traffic and if you do a lot of article writing and spinning, you’ll eventually see lots of it.

Related Articles: Review of The Best Spinner  —  Article Spinning Explained (Video)


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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 4:02 pm and is filed under SEO and .EDU Backlinks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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