Google exposes myths of duplicate content

For years people have had this all wrong, I knew it and for those other experts or really experienced folks it’s been a nice bit of padding between those who have studied and eat their wheaties every morning, and those who don’t.

On September 15th, Google used their relatively new "Webmaster Central" channel on Youtube to broadcast a 14 minute video detailing everything you should know about duplicate content. What’s true, what’s not etc.

No time to watch a 14 minute video? I know how you feel!

The gist is this. Having a print version, or a 2nd or 3rd copy of a page will not cause any penalty. It might only rank one of the 3 versions, but if they’re both the same or very close, who cares, right?

Heck, you may have seen this before:

It’s not a penalty. That’s what they’re saying and I fully agree.

You’ll find the dangerous Google slap of having entire pages or domains being deleted from the index comes from copying other sites COMPLETELY without any user benefit. No change in navigation, code, etc and there’s other factors that come into play too.

Basicly, if you’re not trying to spam they figure you shouldn’t worry. But at least they took the time to clear that up in a really indepth video.

What’s weird about this video is that it’s not the infamous Matt Cutts , who traditionally posts all the Webmaster Central videos on their channel. This is kind of interesting. It’s also quite a bit longer than Matt’s few second quips solving various things that plauge the non-technical webmaster.

Makes me kinda wonder why they went out of their way to address this one, although, working with a client this week who was working so hard to prevent hackers and others from seeing stuff, I can only imagine what that must be like for Google. They’ve probably got tons of webmasters trying to create these printable versions and tools like WordPress constantly "accidentally" making dupe pages, and stressing people out. Google’s saying the same message they have for years… "Hey folks! It’s cool, just don’t be evil.."

Until Next Time Guys…
Daniel J Deyette