First off…let me start by saying I am in no way associated with Google or anyone who works for Google. I am a software engineer but I have not seen the code used to drive Google’s search engine bot. With that being said I want to give you my take on how Google handles the whole duplicate content issue.
To give you a little background on how this came about I posted a link to a wordpress plugin developed by the people at EzineAriticles.com that allows you to take a blog post and then submit it to their system as a new article. This is a great service and I am glad to see EzineArticles.com take this step but if you read the editorial guidelines of their site you would see that they do not allow duplicate content.
Doesn’t this fly in the face of that guideline?
NO!
When they say “No Duplicate Content”, they want to make sure that you are the author and that your article is not some PLR piece of junk.
So how does this new plugin help? Well it is going to save you some time when you submit your unique content to their system. Sure it is only a couple of button clicks and a copy/paste operation but I will take what I can get. I just hope some of the other article submission sites get together and create one plugin that would do the same.
There are a lot of third party software packages that do this functionality but most of them don’t work right…I have yet to test one that does what it says it does.
OK…so let’s talk a little about Google and the duplicate content issues they come across.
When Google talks about duplicate content there really are two things they are referencing.
The first is affiliate type websites.
I am talking about those websites that are www.somesite.com but when I sign up I get a unique link that looks something like www.somesite.com/?id=brian
Google will find my link on some forum or some blog and follow that back only to find that the content is the exact same as the main www.somesite.com.
Now here is were the penalty kicks in. If my affiliate page was different than the main page, my link would get a little link juice meaning I would get credit in Google’s eyes for a backlink. But, since this is an affiliate page and the content is the exact same I will get no credit at all.
Now is there a penality for this? From what I understand…YES.
The main site will get a negative score because Google does not like affiliate type pages to show up in search results. Google wants good unique content.
The second is duplicate content on different websites.
This one is handled differently than what you might think. Google’s bot will go out to the Internet and scrape content from all the websites that it knows about. As it goes along it will pick up on duplicate content and store references to that content.
When a person does a search that that content is optimized for, Google will pick the page that it thinks is the originator of the content and show that page in the search engine results pages. It will also mute the other instances of that content.
Google does this because they want variety. So why is having duplicate content a good thing?
As Google makes determinations on content and relevance they will see that a bunch of sites have this duplicate content and they will determine that content must be good stuff for it to show up all over the place. You actually get more link love if you set this up properly.
Google knows that content gets syndicated and sometimes it is not the authors fault that content is getting distributed all over the Internet. Google is not going to punish you for something you might not have any control over.
So what is the best way to make sure you get credit for your content?
When I post new content, I wait a couple of days to make sure Google has indexed my new content. After that, I publish that content to EzineArticles.com. Once my article is published on their site and running, I will then post my article to about 20 other article sites.
The best part is…once that content is published, other marketers will use my articles on their sites and that gives me more backlinks that have tons of relevance in Google’s eyes.
It’s a win-win
Tags: backlinks, duplicate content, ezinearticles.com, google
Tags: backlinks, duplicate content, ezinearticles.com, google
