Duplicate content Examined

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By Joe Whyte, Tuesday, 9th May 2006

Duplicate content is a huge debate in the SEO world right now. You have hardcore views that duplicate content is bad and can get you banned along with damage your PR and SERP's and on the other extreme you have the view that it doesn't effect you at all. Who is right? Why are they right? From what I have learned in life is that when to parties are arguing usually they are both inflating there point of view and the real truth lies somewhere in the middle.

With duplicate content both extremes are just to EXTREME for a realist like me. I will attempt to break down how duplicate content truly works and provide evidence of my findings.

The first thing I think of when someone says duplicate content is all of the newspaper site's out there in the entire online world. Every time a news story comes along there are thousands or millions of online magazines, publications and newspaper sites that report the SAME INFORMATION. Maybe not word for word (not that it matters) but in some cases it is word for word. What is interesting about this is that these newspaper sites don't loose ranking in the SERP's and there PR is usually over a PR5. The NYTIMES.com is a pr 10! How many newspapers do you think there are in New York that all are going to report the same information?

Ok, so that isn't enough proof. In the last couple years RSS feeds have been a huge success. RSS stands for really simple syndication. Basically the concept is that someone creates information on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and allows other websites to use this content. THAT IS DUPLICATE CONTENT no matter how you spin this. I have not seen sites drop because of RSS feeds. In fact I have seen google index and cache my sites daily because of it. Ok not enough still?

Online stores and shopping affiliates and dropshippers don't seem to be phased by this duplicate content. These sites allow you to place a item for sale on your site USUALLY with a description of a product. I have not seen anyone be discredited for these. I have worked on hundreds of sites like this and this is more a way to generate sales then traffic and I have not seen any rankings lost because of this.

Now this is proof enough for me to know that duplicate content doesn't damage your rankings. Perhaps instead of damaging your rankings it might omit duplicate content though. If we take this theory then that would definatly be more sensible. Lets examine this!

I was reading the Google webmaster guidelines and they say: "It's also important to keep in mind that our crawlers don't index duplicate content". Check out the webmaster guidelines for google. Ok so you may be thinking the gig is up what are we to do. Don't worry as this perptaines to literal duplicate content. If you create a web page and then re-create the exact webpage down to the T then this rule applies. Google will not index duplicate content. There are a few wholes in this rule that we need to examine.

1. if a page is recreated then will both of the sites not be indexed or just the new one?
2. What percentage of the site should not be duplicated to ensure to follow the google guidelines.

In response to questions one. There is no way for a search engine to tell what site was created first other then its cache date but google cannot base their decision on this as spiders crawl and index pages at sporadic intervals and this would not be an accurate way of measure. For example if site A was created a day before site B was and both were identical replicates then a webcrawler might find site A the same day a webcrawler finds site B but the crawler that finds site A might go on to index hundreds of other sites while site B's crawler goe's directly back to google to report its findings. In essence these crawlers are bringing back an inaccurate result for its duplicate content.

In response to question two I have this response. For duplicate content I would say stay under 50% of your total page and because I like to be safe I would say stay half of that. So around 25% of your web page was duplicate copy I think you will be pretty safe when you hit the duplicate content filter. As long as the search engine can see that you have created something unique on your page even though you may be referencing other sites then you are ok. The problem occurs when you have just done a straight copy and paste job to create a site which many spammers do. By the way I have seen copy and paste jobs get rankings.

Here is what I have seen. I used to work for a real estate web design, hosting and marketing company and we created template real estate sites for over 30,000 clients. Everyone of these 30,000 clients had the same exact information for all of their sites. Each one was indexed and cached and with a lil attention on linking was then ranked for keyword terms (some very competitive). In my opinion there might be a duplicate content filter. The way this filter works is still an ongoing debate and really the only thing we have to go off of is our experience. Let me lay out what a quality site would have.

A quality site will have original content specifically about the topic the site is trying to address. There are 2 kinds of sites and expert site which takes link's from authority sites and brings in information from authority sites. Then you have the authority sites which have many expert sites linking to it. These authority sites create useful unique content on a regular basis. If you stick to this rule of thumb you should be fine.

If you have time to read another article I would suggest an article over at search engine round table. http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003398.html

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