Penalties for Duplicate Pages of Content?

Will Search Engines Penalize a Site for Pages of Duplicate Content? True … or False?

As a professional SEO consultant, I am naturally involved in the issue of content that my clients have on their existing websites, or will be inserting into their new websites. I have to be on the look-out for duplicate content issues, for sure. I know that duplicate content is not clearly understood by many people, as far as it is concerned with the search engines, so let me touch upon this issue in today’s post.

You Won’t Get Penalized, but You Will Get Your Hand Slapped!

Yes, if you are my client, I will give you a loving hand-slap! Because duplicate content just isn’t good practice. If you want to utilize the same keyword phrase in more than one article, then provide content that isn’t identical to another article.

I am sure there are ways that most of us can come up with to write about a topic, but with a different slat. If you think that littering your site with duplicate content helps raise your search engine rankings for that specific keyword phrase … you are dead wrong. Don’t do it!

Here’s the simple nitty-gritty: though Google, MSN and Yahoo! are NOT going to harshly “penalize” you by totally banning your website from ever getting listed in the SERPs (as many people seem to think will happen), what REALLY does happen is that your duplicate content will confuse the search engine spiders.

Those busy little spiders won’t know which page you consider the most important page of information. Many e-commerce sites encounter the issue of duplicate pages of content because they may have to cross reference a product under more than one category listing. There are ways to combat this, and you’ll find a newly introduced solution to the handling of “necessary” duplicate content here in my article on: Canonical Tags.

And so … out of all the different URLs that comprise the duplicate pages sitting on a website, only one will normally be indexed. However, you may find some or all of the URLs listed, it just depends upon the search engine (and a few other factors). There is a bit of a grey area as regards to this issue, as we often find in matters of SEO!

But a bit worse than what I’ve just mentioned, is that you are diluting your site’s internal link popularity, which isn’t the best thing to do, as far as your rankings are concerned.

So the best thing to do as I mentioned above, is to come up with unique content on your site if you want to utilize the same keyword phrase you’ve optimized on another page. It is done all the time, as most keyword phrases can probably be utilized in quality articles that provide many different facets of information.

So … no duplicate content! Put your thinking cap on, get creative, and provide your site’s visitors with informative and unique articles to read.

Claudia is a professional SEO consultant who offers a complimentary consultation to anyone sincerely interested in learning what they can do to improve their website or blog’s rankings, visitor traffic and conversion rates.