Search Engine Marketing News
Google clarifies duplicate content SEO issues
Monday, 15 September 2008Google has moved to dispel some of the myths surrounding the impact that duplicate website content can have on search engine optimisation (SEO).
In a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, webmaster trends analyst Susan Moskwa emphasised that a "duplicate content penalty" does not exist, although there are certain penalties linked to practices such as content scraping from another site, for example.
She advised website owners to refrain from creating multiple sub-domains, domains and pages that contain the same content and to avoid affiliate programs that offer little in the way of original content.
Ms Moskwa also highlighted the fact that having multiple URLS on the same domain lead to the same content does not result in penalties, although it could affect site performance.
"Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you've been duplicating deliberately, it's unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty," she summed up.
According to Google engineer Matt Cutts, a normal site that has been optimised using white hat SEO usually does not need to worry about having up to three versions of the same article on their site and suffering penalties as a result.