This is John Locke, and today we're going to talk about the myth of the duplicate
content penalty. Duplicate content is perhaps the thing that most people misunderstand
about SEO. Many people have anxiety about it.
I think many of you fear having duplicate content more than you
fear getting spammy links. There's a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt around
duplicate content. People think that if they have duplicated content from their
site somewhere else on the web, that Google is going to penalize your site.
The fact of the matter is, Google said in 2008 that there is no duplicate
content penalty. At least not in the way that people imagine that there is. Google
does not penalize duplicate content. Here's what actually
happens when there is duplicate content. When there are two different pages or
more that have the same content on the web, Google is forced to choose which one
is the most relevant. Meaning, if you have the same content on different pages,
Google must choose which one to rank the highest. There are
certain examples of duplicate content that we've gotten questions about, such
as, "If I take blocks of content off of my home page, or about page and put it
on my Facebook, LinkedIn page, or my Yelp page, am I going to get a duplicate
content penalty?" The answer to that is, "No". Google expects you to have some of the
same wording across your site. Think about it from a logical standpoint. About
twenty-five to thirty percent of the web is actually duplicate content. If you
really stop and think about it. Think about how much stuff is copied just in
the footer section of websites. It's the same thing, right? That's
duplicate content. A lot of content is scraped, by scraper sites, and these
do not hurt you, or harm you in any way. Let's first define what Google looks at
as duplicate content. Duplicate content in Google's eyes is any
blocks of content that are appreciably the same, or similar in nature in to one another, that
appear on the same domain, or they appear on other domains. Where Google does
not care is if you are repeating some of the same content on your different
properties, or even on your own website. Where Google does care is if you are
trying to manipulate search rankings, and we'll talk about that in a second. But,
let's just say for the sake of clarity, that duplicate content is any time that
you take a the same block of content, and a page is 50% or more the same as another page.
Most often, you're going to see this in what we call "boilerplate content"
where the page is partially duplicated, but you're basically trying
to rank like different things with very similar pages (a doorway page). Let's say that we have some sort of
service site. It might be a HVAC, or electrical, or plumbing, or a locksmith, or
auto repair, or something like that. But they're trying to target all these
different cities in their region, and neighborhoods. What they do is
create landing pages that are all for specific cities. These pages have
mostly the same content on them. The only thing that is changed out is the
city name, the title, and the URL of the page, (the keyword in) the body
content. Everything else is basically the same.If the rest of the site is
high quality content, then these pages
would be considered low quality content. When Google sees that you have
boilerplate content, and it's just basically duplicated from another page
on your site, and not much has changed, that's considered low-quality content.
I can tell you in most cases, that Google is going to choose the home page
of the site, (or a dedicated page for that particular service), then
Google is going to choose that over these types of (city-specific) landing pages.
About five or ten percent of the time, if you put a little bit of effort into
these pages, and put some original content on each page, and
say specific things that you've done in that city, or you have
reviews from that city, where you talk to different clients from that
city, and describe different things in that city. Have photos of
that city, or better yet, if you actually have
locations or offices within those cities, then you stand a fighting chance of
ranking those pages. But if you're just copying, it's not really going to do much. Because
those are low-quality pages. However, they're not duplicate content in the way that (people say), like it's
going to get your site penalized. They are duplicate content, but they're
low quality pages. They're not going to earn your entire website a
Google penalty. If you have high quality content on other pages, on your site, then you
still can rank for those pages. But these (city specific) pages will probably not be selected, because
Google will see that there's better pages to select. Here's some
things that can cause duplicate content. These are things you're probably not thinking of when I
say "Duplicate Content". If you
have protocols on your web address like HTTP, HTTPS, no www, and www -- if you
can resolve two different combinations of those, and they don't all resolve down
into one specific combination -- that is duplicate content .Google sees if your
website can resolve to (either) HTTP or HTTPS for the same web address. Those are
essentially two separate URLs. And (if they both resolve without forwarding), Google sees those as duplicate
duplicate content. So now they have to decide which one is the definitive page that they should
rank. Make sure that you have those things fixed if you have an e-commerce
site. If you add parameters, or you allow people to search by category,
(sometimes) those different internal search parameters are added to the end of the URL,
that can be duplicate content as well. If you
have session IDs, that can create duplicated content, so Google has to
decide which page to rank. Speaking of e-commerce stores, here are other cases where
people ask this question about duplicate content. Question: "I have content
that's on the product page, but then there's the product category
pages, product tag pages, eve the home page (has some of the same content -- is that duplicate content?")
Google is generally going to pick either the specific product, the category, or the
home page in most cases if they can't figure out which is the "original" content. They might
choose the the shop page, or the product category page. Sometimes they'll pick the
home page. But you're making Google decide which is the definitive page,
the best page for people searching for different things. Let's talk about
cloaked and doorway pages. So doorway pages are not specifically duplicate content, but they
are a type of page that Google does actively penalize. This is where you
write content for a page that is specifically meaning to rank and then
either people can't get what they want, or they think that they're getting
something, but they're not getting it or it does a redirect to a different page. (Cloaked pages).
Examples of thisL let's say that I have an e-commerce store, and I sell
coffee cups. Then instead of trying to make a page where it's my
store page of different coffee cups that you can buy -- I write this big long essay
on the history of coffee cups and try and rank that instead. But there's no
link in there to the actual shop page. There's no actual links to the products
to buy, or it does a redirect to some other page that people aren't expecting
to land on, that doesn't show up in the search results. Those would be
examples of cloaked or doorway pages. That's a different type of a thing.
So, Google is going to
choose what they think is the best page out of these things, a boilerplate page, not
duplicate content, just low-quality. Your website is not penalized for duplicate
content. Google expects to see it to a degree.
Scraper sites, let's talk about that. Scraper sites -- people ask about this
one all the time. They often say, "Should I disavow sites that are scraping my
content? They're taking my blog posts, and reposting them."
Any type of site that's reasonably popular, gets scraped all the
time. Google doesn't really do anything (negative) to these sites. that basically ignores
them. These pages do not hurt you. They do not help you. Google basically
ignores them. They very rarely rank. If you have internal links on
your site, and they scrape those, creating a page -- those might link back. Although this don't really give
you a ton of benefit, you might get a click here or there.
But Google basically ignores those pages. Now, if somebody is flagrantly stealing your
content, your design, your content, word for word copying it ?
Then you should file a DMCA takedown. We talked about this in a
previous video. If they're just riffing on the same idea as you are, that's not
duplicate content. If they steal it word for word, you should probably talk to a
lawyer and get them to take it down. Let's say
that your website (and I've seen this before) --
let's say you own a website and you're hurting for content. You want to put
content up, but you don't want to write your own content. So you want to take somebody else's
content and put it up on your site. If it's licensed, meaning, if
it's going through the AP or Reuters or something like that, then that is
looked at as syndicated content. It's the same thing with press releases. It is
syndicated content. It's not necessarily duplicate content.Those are things that
are normal, and a natural way that content get circulated throughout many sites. But
if you take somebody else's content and put it on your site, or you quote a
big chunk of it, and then you want to add some of your own commentary on it --
a site like DaringFireball.net built their whole brand -- they
built their whole website on top of riffing on different people's content. Quoting pieces of
other people's articles, and then riffing on them (Daring Fireball is a big site about Apple
products.) Now this could be duplicate content, but they're adding their own original
commentary to it. Google sees it as, "Hey there's a little bit of
added quality to this content. It's not just word for word plagiarism."
(if you did have word for word identical content), one thing you would do is, add a
canonical tag to the page. If you're using WordPress, many SEO
plugins provide this out-of-the-box. Canonical tags are just a way to say,
"This is the definitive URL for this page." So, if you take somebody else's writing,
which I don't advise doing, by the way, and you point that canonical tag
toward the original article, you're not going to be hit (by a penalty).
Nobody's going to be hit for a duplicate content penalty. But you're not
going to be seen as necessarily lower quality. The best
thing to do as far as content, you should always point the canonical
tag toward the original source material. if that's what you're going to do.
Which I don't advise. Talking about your own website. It's the same thing. If you have repeated content,
Google's will choose what they
think is the best. If you have sections that repeat, that's probably no
big deal. If you're rewriting something from your site, you might
compete with different pages. But it's not going to penalize your whole site.
There is no duplicate content penalty. Say it
with me now, "There's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty." You might have
low quality content, but it's not duplicate content. Let's see if there's anything
else I wanted to talk about today.
So manipulating rankings. That's where Google cares. Manipulating rankings would
be taking the same article, or something that's 95 percent of the
same article, and let's say you have a whole bunch of domains, that are all very
similar. That would be trying to manipulate rankings. If you took the
same exact article, and posted on a bunch of different domains that you own, that are
all in the same category? You're trying to chew up more of the search results
space. That will be something that Google cares about. That is when
they would hit you with a manual penalty. That would not be an algorithmic
low-quality penalty. That would be Google saying, "This is a person trying to
manipulate the rankings, and chew up more space in the SERPs." The only other "penalties" that would
happen occur algorithmically. Google would choose the highest rated --
the highest -- sorry, there's a
plane overhead --
The site that is highest rated, or the
the site that is the original. It's not always the original, it's the highest
ranking, or the highest-rated site the one with the most authority. Usually the
one with the most links coming in, with the the best brand will be the page
that ranks the highest. The other ones will generally be filtered out of
the search results. Last thing I want to talk about, coming back to doorway
pages for a second -- let's talk about this with e-commerce specifically. Because
this is where this happens sometimes. Let's say that you have an e-commerce
page. We'll go back to the coffee cup example.This
would be a place where duplicate content, manipulated content, or doorway pages
would come into play. Let's say that you have a page you have a site where you're
selling coffee cups. Instead of having one page where you have the
ability to set select different colors of coffee cups, you have different URLs (for cup varieties).
You have separate pages for red coffee cups, blue coffee cups, green coffee cups --
that would be an attempt to manipulate rankings. That would be
dangerously close to a doorway page. Google has gone on record saying,
it's better to have one high-quality generic page, than to have a whole
bunch of mediocre pages, where you're trying to manipulate keywords. That's
the case of that. Give people what they want. If you're going to have
specific landing pages for different cities/products, make sure that there's original
content. And that people can get what they want
Match the searcher intent. Have original content. Don't just have boilerplate
stuff. Lastly, you don't get hit with a duplicate content penalty that wipes out
your entire website. If you have pages that are seen as low-quality, then they probably won't rank.
Duplicate content is not a
thing, unless you're trying to chew up more of the search rankings and
manipulate rankings in a way that's unnatural.
I hope that answers that question. Why do people get confused with this? The
biggest reason, I think, is they read random blog posts and repeat it.
Please don't be one of those people. Go straight to the source.
Google has a whole page on what duplicate content is. If you also look at
the if you Google duplicate content penalty you will look at all the top
results on that search results page, you will see that it is a verified myth. I hope that
answers that question. My name is John Locke. We help manufacturing and
industrial companies here at Lockedown Design and SEO. If you have an SEO
question, drop it in the comments below. We'll do our best to answer it. Until
next time, peace.