Is The Duplicate Filter A Myth Then?

I'm taking a day off talking about Blogging to raise an issue about SEO that is to say the least contentious, this being all about Duplicate Content.

The Dangers of Duplicate Content ?

For my part, I like many others have always considered that there on inherant dangers in hosting duplicate content on a website, some pundits stating that using content on your site that has been used on others will cause those pages to be disregarded by the Engines, some pundits going so far as to say that your site would be blacklisted!

No Blacklists but Maybe Just Ignored?

The rules that I saw (and to a degree believed) stated that the Engines, being so clever an all, would work out where the content first appeared and then disregard it when ever it saw it again. I was always a bit doubtful of this fact simply because sites get spidered at widely different rates (from minutes to weeks). As this means that the time a spider comes across a page has no relation to when it was first posted (on that site), it also means that the Engines cannot really 'tell' where the text appeared first anywhere. Thus it cannot penalise sites when it comes across the text again. It does however not follow that it will give any site it finds the text on any benefits. In other words you won't get penalised, but you probaby won't get anything out of it either (just like the issue of paid for links - see a later blog)

This sounds quite plausible to me and as I have seen duplicate sites listed in Google with my own eyes, most often when a page is listed under two different Domain Names. So if this is indeed the case what is all the fuss on the web about, all those sites which allow you to check for duplicate content plus of course all those sites full of words of doom?

From the research I have been doing in the past weeks, it looks like the issue of duplicate content is indeed a bit of a red fish (I mean herring), the words of Matt Cutt (yes Mr Google himself) perhaps putting the matter to bed for once and for all. The best resource on this matter is perhaps the one on Buzzle, the whole area of duplicate content being covered in some detail.

Duplicate Content - Nothing to Worry About Really.

The issue of duplicate content is therefore not as important as many would have you believe, but that does not go to say that you should use duplicate content 'willy nilly' as Google do boost the page it reckons is the best. This is especially being important on Ecommerce sites where the use of xml feeds from product sites can really turn Google off (the product pages looking exactly the same as hundreds of others - Google after all has limits like all of us).

So do try to use original content, but don't get too hung up about the issue and remember perhaps this one point. If you can, over time, convince Google that your site is an authority on something, then it will be inclined to think that your pages are the best, even if perhaps the content is not totally unique...