The Myth of Duplicate Content by Lisbeth Tanz

By Michele Scism
The Results Lady

This morning I read a fabulous blog post from my friend Lisbeth Tanz of Savvy Freelance Writers.  Lisbeth was talking about the dreaded “duplicate content” search engine penalty.  I love her ability to explain things in such a way that any of us can understand.

I thought you might want to read her article:

The Myth of Duplicate Content by Lisbeth Tanz

There are a number of  misconceptions about search engines, especially Google, and how they treat blog posts and articles. One such misconception is called “duplicate content.” The myth is that if you submit the same content to a bunch of different places, you’ll be penalized for having the same content in multiple locations. If this were true, article directories would have died long ago.

Syndication is a good thing. If a bot comes across multiple domains with the same content, it will algorithmically determine which URL best represents the duplicate content. If you have duplicate content on your site, the bot will do the same thing. The search engines’ job is to provide searchers with the best representatives of the data they’re looking for, not provide different URLs with the same content.

The easiest way to reduce the potential of being labeled a “search engine deceiver” is to create a noindex meta tag for the duplicate content. This tells the bot to ignore it.

Of course, if you have a large amount of duplicate content on your site, you will be penalized and labeled an online nuisance. In retaliation, the search engines may stop indexing your site or, at the very least, reduce its ranking considerably. Think this is hard to do?**read more**

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Thanks Lisbeth for a great article and putting my mind at ease. I am glad to know that this is not considered duplicate content.