Google’s “duplicate content penalty” gives web designers fits, despite Google’s steadfast denial of any “penalty.” It really doesn’t matter who’s right; it all boils down to a matter of semantics. Webmasters and Google simply view “duplicate content” from different perspectives: rankings vs. filtering.
Duplicate content can occur when webmasters attempt to improve search engine rankings and increase traffic by utilizing popular search queries. Duplicate content should not be confused with plagiarism in which content is lifted from one site and republished as unique content on another site. That’s a definite Google foul, as is republishing content without adding additional value. Duplicate content is the non-malicious and usually unintentional repetition of chunks of content within or across domains. It generally occurs when pages are stored in multiple formats with multiple distinct URLs. It’s easy for multiple key words in a search engine to pull up the same content from different URLs, effectively “duplicating” the same content. The problem, besides the obvious desire to present unique content to searchers, is that searchers may receive a less desirable version of your webpage which, naturally, you want to avoid.
The disagreement over duplicate content occurs because website owners and Google don’t have the same goal. You are focused on ranking. You want your website or webpage to be among the first 10 to 20 pulled up in a search. Therefore, you want your unique content to be available from as many search avenues as possible. Google focuses on filtering. In a December 18, 2006 post on its Webmaster Central Blog, Google explained its approach this way:
“During our crawling and when serving search results, we try hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has articles in ‘regular’ and ‘printer’ versions … we’ll choose one version to list. In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments.”
This is the origin of the perceived “duplicate content penalty.” Google says having multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content won’t earn you a trip to the principals office, but it does cause Google to react in a way that webmasters don’t find favorable, hence their sense of being penalized. Because Google’s goal is to show searchers 10 different results, Google groups URLs that point to duplicate content and selects what it considers the best URL to represent the group. Unfortunately, Google’s choice isn’t always the one you want searchers to see.
Friday: Avoiding Google’s duplicate content penalty
