Duplicate Content is a term often fraught with warning when it comes to online marketing and SEO. It has even become associated with another term, the dreaded ‘Google Slap’. The latter refers to an intentional decrease by Google of your page’s search results placement ranking.

However, duplicate content is getting more of a bad rap than it should. It’s just not as bad as it is often made out to be. Google doesn’t actually punish, but merely strives to deliver comprehensive and relevant results for the user.

Google’s goal is to deliver the best value for a given search term, so that the user continues to use Google. The intent is to avoid producing a dozen of the exact same web pages in the search results (which would potentially be the case for replicated web sites belonging to affiliate marketers).

This means of course that a company replicated web page has no real marketing value in and of itself.

And, Google is more particular about the content of the pages leading from it’s ads. This affects affiliate marketers more than anyone.

Posting Content to Multiple Listing Sites is OK!

I have posted very close to the same content across various article sites, forums or groups, as well as this blog. Typically the topic starts in one place, often after receiving some commentary and working it over a bit, it evolves to a slightly different form elsewhere. Sometimes they are slightly duplicated, but sometimes they are complete duplicates.

However,  I became more concerned about my perceptions of this content, and its consequences, when someone for whom I had written a post decided not to keep the post on their blog after they had noticed I had posted a very similar (almost duplicate) version at this blog. 

Even though I had changed the title and tweaked the first half of the paragraphs, they felt it was a duplicate and took it off of their blog.

Not long after that, I ran across this video from a Google representative, explaining that it’s not as if Google decreases your rankings for duplicate content, but rather if there is an exact copy on more than one URL, then it simply selects the highest ranked one of those URLs to place, electing not to place the others on the results page.

So after seeing this video and doing some further digging, it became clear to me that Google does not intend to punish those who are providing original content, even if posted in multiple places (however this may be diluting a potential ranking).

And even eZineArticles, though specifying it wants only original content, does not mean that you cannot have your own content in multiple places. The just want that content to be YOURs!

So, aside from replicated web pages, or affiliate links from Google PPC ads, your SEO is not as much in jeopardy as you may have been led to believe. There is no ‘Google Slap’ given to those choosing to distribute their content in multiple places!

Happy Posting!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 8:51 PM and is filed under Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.