When I'm feeling lazy and need an excuse not to do some work on my campaigns, I find myself browsing a few of the internet marketing forums out there.

Today, I saw a thread "The Duplicate Content Penalty is Tragic" and it made me realise that i) you really need to be careful who you take advice from on internet marketing forums and ii) that people get sucked in by all the hype.

The only thing tragic about the duplicate content penalty is that it doesn't exist. Well, not across domains anyway.

That's Right - It Doesn't Exist

A large portion of the modern internet is duplicated - it's a fact that can't be denied. RSS feeds, press releases, news items and the many thousands of articles that people submit to article directories on a daily basis. To punish people for having content on their web site that is duplicated elsewhere would be i) very stupid for the search engines and ii) near impossible to regulate.

Let's ignore the fact that in many occassions duplicated content is what the end user wants (news reports, weather, flight arrivals, tag pages on blogs) and look at this from a logistical point of view. Every piece of content originates somewhere, so if a punishment is to be applied then it should be applied to every web site apart from the site that originally produced the content, right?

But how do you figure out who produced it first? There isn't a creation timestamp attached to every online document and it's a well known fact that the time at which it is indexed is not a good metric since some pages are created months before they are indexed and it all depends on the site structure and crawl regularity for any given domain.

I've heard some suggestions that Google will determine the most authoritative place on which the content exists and apply a penalty to the remainder of sites. What rubbish!

The Only Time When A Duplicate Content Penalty Exists

The only time you risk getting punished by Google for duplicate content is when you have two or more very similar pages on the same domain.

Apart from anything else this makes sense because it stops webmasters from optimising a single piece of content for multiple key phrases - It prevents spamming.

Duplicate Content and the SERPTs

Here's the most common reason why people are confused. Whilst it's true that your web site won't get a penalty for having content that is similar to another web site it may not be easy to rank in Google. And when a webmaster can't get their page ranked in Google then they scream and rant about the "sandbox" because of duplicate content.

Here's the reality - Google will only show the most important source of any given content. You'll never see a page in the SERPs that has the same content over and over again from a number of different sites because this is awful for user experience.

The most important page is usually the one with the most backlinks or the one that is on the domain with the most authority. This is why you should be careful when submitting your articles to content syndication points such as article directories. If your artice is indexed on a powerful site, then there's a chance that Google will view that page as more important as the original source, ie. your site. Therefore you may lose traffic by syndicating your content!

If this happens, backlink the heck out of the corresponding page on your own domain and you'll reclaim the spot.

Matt Cutts, head of Google spam team, puts it better than I can : http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/duplicate-content-question/

From Google Themselves...

Greg clears up the duplicate content penalty myth in no uncertain terms!

What About Print Versions etc.

Sometimes it's good for user experience to have a printer friendly version of the web page.

In this instance use the canonical URL tag to tell Google which is the proper version of the page. Add this tag to the head section of all pages that contain similar pieces of content:

<link rel="canonical" href="url-of-main-page-for-content" / >