Duplicate Content: When Will it Harm or Not Harm Your Website at All

Duplication of content is one of the reasons that will affect your search ranking. Greg Grothaus, a software engineer of Google, explained duplicate content though video presentation and it has gotten more confusing, and most SEOs became quite worried about what this so called Duplicate Content Penalty. However, they have cleared this one out and said at the beginning of the video. “First and foremost I want to clear up a myth that has been going around called the duplicate content penalty. Generally speaking, people are worried that Google has a penalty for sites that have duplicate content on them…. What we’re doing for that specific query we are omitting the print article. It’s not a penalty.” They have also released in the Webmaster Central Blog that “There’s no such thing as a duplicate content penalty”. Though these statements have given most of us some sort of relief, duplication of content still hurts our website’s PageRank. When will this duplication of content become a bad idea in our website? Well, it all boils down to the reason why you wanted to duplicate that particular content. Now if you intend to have a higher ranking, then don’t do duplication end of the story. The exact words Google said about their blog regarding duplicate content is that “Duplicate content on a site is not a ground for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.” And that’s the time when duplication is bad for your site through demotes your rank or worst removing you completely on the search list. It is also an indication of spamming and we all know that spamming is super bad for our site. On the other hand, when will the duplication be fine for our website? There are two reasons I can actually think the first one is when there are several URL of our website points out the same page of our site. The search engine will index those URLs separately and as a result it indexed the same content which means it is a duplicate content. Though it pointed out the same page in the eyes of the search engine it was just indexed separately. Most of the time the search engine will just choose the URL that would represent that particular page best. The second reason would be if you wanted to create a specific function for your website. Let say, if you wanted to make another site that will have a printable version of the pages then most probably you will be duplicating most of its content. However this duplication will appear as an additive search engine results, however if the user will look for pages that has a printable version of your page then most likely it will appear instead of the original web page. There are actually other reasons when duplication of content will be okay for your website. You just have to take note on the purpose why you need to reuse that content. Well, it is just so weird to have duplicate content that will appear on the search engine, I mean you don’t want to end up searching the same thing over and over again. So better be careful in doing so and you’re safe.