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Website Duplicate Content - Don't Take Google's Duplicate Content Penalty Personally
Google is not human, so don't feel paranoid when your web pages get filtered out of the search results
Webmasters worry about Google's duplicate content penalty and, every time there is a change detected in Google's internal secret systems, the worrying becomes so intense that it verges on paranoia. However, much of this worry is unnecessary. Duplicate content penalties can be avoided and, if your website is penalised for duplicate content, this need not be fatal.
The penalty for having duplicate content is that the pages containing that content will not appear in the search engine organic results. It does not mean that your whole website will be de-indexed automatically if, for instance, you publish an article that already appears in other places online.
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The severity of the damage depends upon the number of duplicated pages Google's filters detect within your web site.
Webmasters worry about Google's duplicate content penalty and, every time there is a change detected in Google's internal secret systems, the worrying becomes so intense that it verges on paranoia. However, much of this worry is unnecessary. Duplicate content penalties can be avoided and, if your website is penalised for duplicate content, this need not be fatal. The penalty for having duplicate content is that the pages containing that content will not appear in the search engine organic results. It does not mean that your whole website will be de-indexed automatically if, for instance, you publish an article that already appears in other places online. The severity of the damage depends upon the number of duplicated pages Google's filters detect within your web site.
Filtering out duplicate content is not intended as a punishment for webmasters who use non-original content. The reason why search engines have developed filters to weed out web pages with duplicate content is simply to increase their efficiency. The search engines are in competition with each other to offer their customers the most relevant information possible. It would not be helpful, from the point of view of the person searching for information, if a search produced links to numerous web pages (and this number could be in the hundreds or even thousands) all containing identical content. Therefore, the search engines will list only a few instances of the particular content in a search result and credit (ie inclusion in the listings) as the source of the information would, in a perfect world, be given to original author. Unfortunately, the world is not perfect and neither is Google.
The pages listed by Google will not always include the original source of the information. This seems massively unfair but Google does not give precedence in organic search results to the website that published an article first. In the case of an article that has been republished through an article directory, Google might consider the article directory to be more important than the author's own website even though the article was published there first. This is because Google relies heavily on the number of back links to a website when determining the relative value of the site. Therefore, it is easy for an established high ranking article directory to take precedence over a less important website even though that site was the original source for the article. The pre-dating by the author's website is overridden by the reliance Google places on the weight of links.
If you write articles and distribute them via article directories, it can be annoying (to put it mildly) to see your article on the first page of a search result, with a link to an article directory while your website, which hosts the original article, is nowhere to be seen because it is languishing in Google's supplemental index (aka "GoogleHell"). According to Google, the way to get your web pages back into the main index is to increase their PR and that is far easier for Google to say than for you to do. So just be thankful for the link back to your site from the article directory and rethink your article distribution strategy.
The way Google's duplicate content filters work might seem a bit like using the proverbial sledgehammer to crack a fairly soft nut, but the search engines are concerned with more than just deciding who should get exposure as the owner/author of a particular web page. The filters have been developed to stop cookie cutter websites from clogging up the system because they are considered to be "spammy".
Duplicate content filters are not 100% foolproof and are not fair but the concept of "fairness" does not exist in the world of machines, so webmasters can rest assured that there is nothing personal or in any way vindictive about the way duplicate content penalties are meted out. Painful and frustrating? Yes, but not personal!
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DISCLAIMER: Elaine Currie works at home online and enjoys sharing resources that have helped to improve her life. In doing so she has created
relationships with certain experts and in recommending their products may receive compensation for doing so.
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