Google and Duplicate Content

Google penalization can occur for many reasons, such as purchased links, bad search engine optimization tactics and others – but one topic that seems to confuse many, is what does Google consider to be duplicate content? What really is duplicate content? Are there tools that I can use to check if the content I have on my website has been duplicated?

What is Duplicate Content

First, duplicate content is when a substantial amount of content is replicated within or across other websites. Content that is an exact match or appreciably similar that seem to be used for malicious practices can be on the grounds for penalization.

What Are Some Examples of Non-Malicious Content in The Eyes of Google

Google States in their webmaster forum “Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one of them to list.”

There are several examples of non-malicious duplicate content that truly is harmless. Here are a few examples:

• Printer Only Versions of Web Page Content
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Discussion Forums that generate both regular and stripped down pages

A Few Tips You Can Use To Help Address Google and Duplicate Content Issues

• Consistent Internal Linking: When internal linking your site, you should keep it as consistent as possible. For instance “www.amsivedigital.com/insights” and “www.amsivedigital.com/insights/“.

• Register for Google Webmaster Tools: Google Webmaster Tools can be used for a variety of things, from submitting sitemaps and viewing diagnostic site information. You can actually tell Google your preferred domain

• Fresh Content: Produce fresh unique content and try to keep 65% of the content unique

Helpful Duplicate Content Checker Tools

To help ensure that your content is not replicated or duplicated – here are some helpful FREE duplicate content checker tools:

• Copyscape.com – Copyscape.com is great. If your content is copied it actually returns the site with highlighted similarities. The downfall is that it will only allow you a certain amount of searches each month.

• Articlechecker.com – Article Checker allows you to copy and paste content that will search the web to see if there are any duplications

Jennifer Gayadin is a SEO Search Strategist for Amsive Digital, a NYC Search Marketing Firm