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Can duplicate content influence your rankings?
Every few months, webmaster forums discuss if search engines
penalize duplicate content.
Duplicate content can happen if web pages publish the same
articles, if different domains point to the same web space
or if webmasters steal the content of other pages. If two
shops sell the same item and use similar shop systems, some
product pages can also look like duplicated web pages.
Is there really a penalty for duplicate content?
There are many opinions in the discussion forums but there's
no proof that search engines really penalize duplicate
content.
If there really was a duplicate content filter then many
news web sites that publish AP or Reuters news would be
banned from search engines. For example, you can find many
web pages with exactly the same article here.
All pages can be found on Google.
However, many people insist that a duplicate content filter
exists.
Why do people think that there's a duplicate content
penalty?
Some people think that there is a duplicate content penalty
because a web page that shows a special article might have
a Google PageRank 0 and another web page with the same
article might have a Google PageRank 5.
Not all web pages with the same content have the same
search engine rankings. If a web site is older than another,
if it has better inbound links and if that site has more
content than it's likely that it will get better rankings
than another page that lists the same article.
That doesn't mean that the web site with the worse ranking
has been penalized. It just means that the other web site
probably has more links and that the page is more trustworthy
to search engines.
Some people think that there must be a duplicate content
filter because additional domain names that point to the
same web space as the main domain name are usually not
listed on search engines.
This is not due to a duplicate content filter. It's an
issue with canonical
URLs. Google has addressed that problem with their
latest ranking
algorithm update.
Whether there is a duplicate content penalty or not has
yet to be proved. If you want to outperform your competition
on search engines, make sure that your web site has unique
content that cannot be found on other sites.
If your web site has unique content, you don't have to worry
about potential duplicate content penalties. Optimize that
content for search engines and make sure that your web site
has good inbound
links.
It's hard to beat a web site with great optimized content
and many good inbound links.
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