Duplicate Content Penalty? – More Likely a Filter

After working in the SEO industry for a number of years, it has been common for the term “duplicate content penalty” to crop up. This term is technically inaccurate as there is no search engine penalty for duplicate content, even though it is not something you should aim to have lots of on your site.

There has always been duplicate content on the internet and it is something that can’t really be avoided. This isn’t something to lose sleep over however because you won’t get your website penalised. Google will simply filter out the duplicate pages. Filter is the key word in this process as this doesn’t actually penalise your site.

Google and other search engines try to index and display the most unique, relevant content as possible. It is their job to do this. Duplicate content is a problem for search engines however they deal with it by applying filters which attempt to remove any pages that display information they already know about. The thing to remember is that although you may feel your site has been penalised, it hasn’t – it is a filter.

Search engines are not trying to catch people out and pick on people for no reason. You won’t get removed from listings for having similar content for two similar products; however you may have to settle for the fact that only one of these products is shown by Google, the other being filtered. If you require both to show up in the search engines, then you should ensure that they are substantially unique.

Rob Bromilow
SEO Programmer, SMO and Hosting Contact