[thomas09]

Hi folks,

There is a popular myth about duplicate content, and that is that Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content.

Greg Grothaus of the Search Quality Team of Google cleard that Google itself is not penalizing you for it.

Google recognizes that most duplicate content is not created to be deceptive. There are of course exceptions, which are considered spam. They're being penalized for being spam but not for having duplicate content.

There are some issues that can arise that may negatively affect your rankings.

1) Your link popularity will be diluted. Backlinks pointing to several different URL versions(like domain.com, www.domain.com, domain.com/index.htm) of the same content, will make it harder to accumulate link juice for one URL.

2) User-unfriendly URLs in search results may offset branding efforts and decrease usability as well.

3) With multiple versions of the same thing, Google will spend more time crawling the same content, meaning it will have less time to go deeper into your site, and you run the risk of having content not get indexed.

More interesting reading at webpronews

[shabbir]

Canonical URLs is what search engines are coming up for such problems of urls

[stephen186]

What I need to ask all Web Masters is Why duplicate content at all. Why fear for something that can be avoided as well. I believe some webmasters ignore the importance of uniqueness and innovativeness.

Does anyone agree to it?

[kickmoko]

yeah...google hates duplicate contents..your site will be penalized.

[gkreech]

what if you are just quoting some content? would Google penalize you for that? what about article directories?

[technica]

According to new rules of Google, Google really do not penalize the sites having duplicate content, it just ignores it and do not index the duplicate content.

[gkreech]

so what's the best thing to do just in case I have a new article. should I first publish it on my website then to Ezinearticles (for example) ?

[shabbir]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gkreech

so what's the best thing to do just in case I have a new article. should I first publish it on my website then to Ezinearticles (for example) ?

Your site. Always. Yes you should hire few other low cost writers to write for ezines.