Duplicate Content in Search Engine Optimisation

Duplicate content is a big issue in search engine optimisation, at Just Search we always try to remove potential duplicate content from our clients websites either beeing from different pages/versions within the website, from other domains owned by the client or other external sources such as syndicated content, directories descriptions, press releases, etc.

Having said that, Google’s senior engineer Matt Cutts posted an article in his blog which implies that whitehat webmasters should not worry too much about duplicate content on their own site:

I often get questions from whitehat sites who are worried that they might receive duplicate content penalties because they have the same article in different formats ( e.g. a paginated version and a printer-ready version). While it’s helpful to try to pick one of those articles and exclude the other version from indexing, typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site.

He also states that it is probably not wise to syndicate content that is already on your website, as it makes it more difficult for Google to determine how much of a website’s content is original vs syndicated. And suggests:

My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content.

That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.

Certainly it’s good to know that Google’s duplicate content system is somewhat flexible, my advice however is to avoid duplicate content both on-site or off-site at all costs.

Tino
SEO Programmer

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