I understand that there are different opinions of whether duplicate content will harm your Google SERP’s or not but the truth of duplicate content can be found in it’s own history. In the late 1990′s site owners discovered that if they repeated the same meta keywords over and over on their website they could fool the search engines and receive a first page placement. But that made a very ugly website so they learned that if they placed there content on the page and then listed keywords in the same color as the background it wouldn’t be seen by the visitor but it would be seen by the search engines. So the roots of keyword spamming were planted and a long keyword spamming war began. One page of content and multiple pages of keyword spam.

And ALT tags began to be used as another form of keyword spamming with descriptions being nothing more than entire strings of keywords. This lead to what was known as doorway pages. Doorway pages were nothing more that a keyword stuffed page used for SERP manipulation with a redirect to the real page. People paid a lot of money to learn how to create doorway pages.

But soon the search engines began to combat keyword spamming. They did this by penalizing your site if you had an unrealistic number of the same words over and over or if you had text the same color as your background. And “Duplicate Content” was born.

“Duplicate Content” is any content that is repeated over and over on one site. It is not content that is published and can be found on different sites. An example would be any site that uses news stories off of the Associated Press. Most news websites use the AP and none are de-indexed by Google for duplicate content. Another example is the hundred’s of article sites all containing the same articles. Yet not one of those article sites have been de-indexed or banned from the search engines.

Is there a Duplicate Content Penalty?

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