Is the Duplicate Content Really Something to Worry About?

Many people associated with internet marketing industry regard duplicate content as even more dangerous than building spam links. Most of them even believe that duplicate content would lead their website to get banned by search engine. People having such kind of discussions are found in different forums which are even SEO related. The even more embarrassing fact is that webmasters do not help in wiping out the myths like this.

A year ago, Google made an attempt to nullify these myths about duplicate content. According to an article posted in Google webmaster blog in 2008:

“Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

You can help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties!”

So, what a duplicate content really is? It is answered by Google. It states, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

There is a small test that you can run by yourself to find out that running speculations about duplicate content are just misconceptions. Just add &filter=0 at the end of a SERP URL. That’ll remove the filtering and you will get to see some exclusive search results.

By adding &filter=0 at the end of the Google result page URL resulted by searching “raleigh seo meetup” will display the same website listed twice in search results. It actually happens due to two versions of the same page; i.e. one for HTTP and another for HTTPS. With that said, it is highly possible that two pages with the same content get indexed by Google.

Amount of duplicate content on the web

According to a recent study, the duplicate content makes 25 – 30 percent of total content available on internet. Another study has shown the similar results.

What does Google have to say about duplicate content?

Experts from Google have been publishing some great information blog posts regarding duplicate content. The common consensus in those posts is that the duplicate content doesn't affect Chiropractic SEO in a direct manner. The best parts are worth mentioning here.

• Google doesn’t penalize your website based on duplicate content.
• With a lot of versions of any particular content available on the web, Google tends to show only one version in order to keep the diversity of information on a result page intact.
• Duplicate content doesn’t incite search engine to take action against it unless the very reason for its existence is to manipulate search results.
• As a matter of fact, the version of any information with undesirably low quality can also show up in search results. It may be counted as a drawback of duplicate content not being penalized.
• Google prefers to show original source of information in search results.
• It’s your choice to take action against the duplicate content. If you have just found out that your content has been copied, you can file a request for that content to be removed.