Since I always believe in going straight to the source, let’s find out what Google has to say about duplicate content. According to Google, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.” Now that we have Google’s definition of duplicate content, let’s look at what they have to say on the issue of how it can impact a website’s ranking:

“Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

“However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.”

“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”

So, if you actually look at what Google is saying about duplicate conent, their stance is that you will only be explicitly penalized if they feel the duplicate content you are publishing is intended to deceive users or manipulate their search results. An example of this would be a Made for AdSense (MFA) website, which only contains content from other websites. The only purpose of a MFA website is to attract visitors who will click the AdSense ads.

If you are wondering how Google judges content and determines malicious duplicate content, this illustration from Elliance (which was published on Search Engine Land) should make that process clear to you:

Now, while you may think that I’m taking the “duplicate content doesn’t matter” stance, that is simply not true. Even if you aren’t publishing duplicate content with malicious intent, you may still run into problems. For example, I think Dave Feldman really hit the nail on the head in his post on SEL earlier this year, which was titled Got Duplicate Content? Don’t Let It Dilute Your SEO Efforts. The main focus of his post was that even when duplicate content isn’t published with malicious intent, it can still hurt your site’s rankings by diluting the weight of your links. Here’s the example he uses:

“Let’s say you have 30 external sites lined up to provide a link to your site; you just need to tell them what page to link to. If all 30 of those links point to the hiking boots page in the Men’s Clothing section, a good deal of link value will be passed to that page.

However, what happens if those 30 links get divvied-up across three different versions of that page, and are split between Men’s Clothing, Footwear, and Outdoors? Potentially, each page would only get 33 percent of that total link value. Clearly, 100 percent would be better.”

In addition to link dilution, the other major area where duplicate content can cause issues is with affiliate websites. As you may know, Google is getting more aggressive in their filtering of “thin affilaite websites” (which are affiliate websites with little original content). Not only can you run into problems with their algorithm, but if your website is hand reviewed by Google, a lack of original content could cause you to fail that review (and thus incur some form of a ranking penalty).

While the duplicate content debate will inevitably continue, at the end of the day, you can avoid a lot of potential headaches and worries by simply creating some form of content that is unique and useful to visitors.

[tags]duplicate content[/tags]

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It’s actually pretty easy to check for plagiarism if you know how to look. The best way to see if your content has been duplicated is to use a service like Copyscape. The other way you can check your website is to copy and paste a single and meaningful line from your website into Google and if that line appears on a search engine results page (SERP), you will see it. Google Alerts also scans the web to look for duplicate content periodically.

If you do manage to detect duplicate content from your website, here are a few steps you can and should take:

1. Contact the thief and politely ask them to remove the duplicate content.You can use Domaintools.com to help find out the contact information of someone who owns a domain. If it’s a major site, then you can attempt to contact the web master directly. After getting the contact info, you should attempt to contact the plagiarist and politely ask them to remove the duplicate content.

2. Contact the search engines, primarily Google, and file a DMCA complaint with them. (The idea is to ensure that the correct site is punished by Google. Also Google may remove the plagiarists’ site from their index entirely.)
3. Contact the plagiarists’ hosting company and file a DMCA complaint.The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) requires hosting companies to remove the plagiarized content. However, you must prove the content is stolen. They are not going to just take your word for it. You can easily prove who published the content to the web first by using internet archive.
4. You can follow up with appropriate legal action if number 1, 2 and 3 do not get the desired results.

Interestingly, checking for plagiarism does not seem to rank high on most webmasters’ lists but it should actually be at the top of a webmasters’ to-do list, given the negative implications it can have on search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

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