Does Google have a “Duplicate Content penalty”? After my “Should bloggers worry about SEO” post yesterday a reader asked, worried about it.
He was concerned about cross-posting his articles and also scrapers and spammers ripping off his content via his feeds.
I know this is a problem many bloggers, especially freelance writers, are concerned about.
Another concern was the effect on his PageRank.
Let’s clear that one up first. Don’t worry about “Pagerank”. Instead of some mystery Pagerank instead you should focus on Google Authority, something we can actually influence. Domain authority scores like pagerank only have financial value because other people perceive it has value. One or two duplicated articles will not impact your domain authority too much.
So PageRank might not be a worry but duplicate content could still drag down your ranking in the search results. Not as a penalty, but because Google might just rank the duplicate over the original.
This is why they recommend using “Canonical Tags”. See Google on Canonicalization.
To specify a canonical URL for duplicate or very similar pages to Google Search, you can indicate your preference using a number of methods. These are, in order of how strongly they can influence canonicalization:
- Redirects: A strong signal that the target of the redirect should become canonical.
rel="canonical"linkannotations: A strong signal that the specified URL should become canonical.- Sitemap inclusion: A weak signal that helps the URLs that are included in a sitemap become canonical.
Usually, if Google finds two identical pages it will only display the first and most authoritative page to be indexed. This is why it is rare for all but a couple of those article syndication sites to rank higher than the author’s own site.
What usually happens is the first page to be indexed is the one on the site Google prefers anyway, or perhaps the one that gets the best links. All the others will be ignored or put into supplemental results to avoid filling the search results with the same content.
To avoid this you need to not post identical content yourself if you can help it. If you want to distribute articles for republication or syndication provide modified content for this purpose. The more different you can make it the better.
As far as all the spammy aggregation sites, don’t sweat it. They only get poor-quality links so don’t tend to out-rank the original. There are solutions to even this, such as DMCA notices.
Just another reason to create unique, original, valuable content!
