In light of my discussion the other day on using other people’s content, I also wanted to cover the topic of duplicate content. Many people worry that any duplicate content on their site will trigger a massive search engine penalty.

Good thing it’s not so, eh? At least not if you have plenty of original content on the site as a whole as well.

If you’re doing something like taking a quote from someone else’s blog to illustrate a point, that is a valid kind of duplicate content. It is also likely to be a small part of the page text, so certainly not likely to trigger a penalty.

Besides, penalties don’t generally happen for duplicate content. It can just be hard to rank over those who are using that same content, unless you somehow use it better.

Even using an entire article, say, from a free article site, won’t trigger a penalty as such. You may have better luck if you add your own touches to the page, but it will not penalize the entire site.

Perhaps the one time you will really cause trouble with duplicate content is if you have two identical websites. When the navigation and all other content are the same, only one is going to get far in the search engines.

But sometimes your site can have multiple ways to reach the same content, especially if you are using PHP. This is common in blogs. Consider how many ways you could read this article. You will see the start of it on the home page of my blog when I first post it. You can find it on the single post page. You can find it in the archives. You can find it under the categories I selected for it. You can find it in the RSS feed.

That’s a lot of ways to find one article.

One of the best ways to understand how to treat duplicate content is to consider carefully what Google says about it. Don’t go too far with your interpretation of what they say. You can consider blocking certain areas of your site from spiders, so that a given article will not appear over and over, for example. Link appropriately to each page, not varying how you do it. Use mod rewrite to ensure that www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com go to the same place.

Little things like that can help quite a bit.

Often enough, when people talk about a duplicate content penalty, they really mean they’re being outranked for something they felt they should not be outranked for. This is especially common for young sites that haven’t built up much trust yet.

A penalty can happen, but most of the time you’ve simply been outranked by a more powerful site or page. It can be just that simple. A penalty happens more from an excess of duplicate content than from the occasional tidbit.

Scrapers can cause some of these issues, and you may have to resort to a DMCA complaint. You can also threaten legal action, although this can be difficult if the site is created and hosted in a different country.

In general, if your site has good authority, you have little to fear from duplicate content penalties. Abuse the system and it can happen, but overall it’s not that likely to be a serious problem.

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