Duplicate Content and Use of “Blockquote”

When implementing search engine optimisation one thing that can harm your efforts is duplicate content, Blogs are particularly prone to having duplicate content, A lot of the time a person has a blog to keep people informed on certain topic areas. For instance the just search blog keeps people informed about search engine optimisation amongst other things. We could bring you information we find on other websites and use some content from that site and show it you here as a quote. Even if it is a quote it is still duplicate content.

One thing some blogging software provides for you is the ability to add text to your blog using the “blockquote” tag, this gives you the opportunity to add the URL of the website you have quoted the text from. This is a great feature but I feel some people could be falling fowl to using this and thinking they have referenced the original text so this is ok. Well from a human point of view you are right. You’re not passing any others content as your own. Googlebot however sees it different, all Google will see is the duplicate content.

I did a little research into the “blockquote” tag and what Googles official stance is on it. Currently they do not have any stance on it! A lot of people suggested that Google should use this tag and if they have used it correctly and cited the original site then as long as quoted text doesn’t take up too much of your page then Google should not see the quote as duplicate text but quoted text.

This is currently not the case but Google changes all the time so let’s wait and see.

Gary
SEO Programmer