Beyond Duplicate Content

I recently read a true story or two about webmasters removing duplicate content from their websites in order to boost their rankings. Investigating further I found that although Google chooses not to be clear and open about it, they may have changed their policy from one of just ignoring duplicate content to actually punishing websites for it in some cases. But there is more to this that just that change.

First, we can all understand that having a bunch of articles that are on thousands of other websites as the basis for your site isn't offering much in the way of new value. On the other hand, let's say you have a following due to your unique pages, or you have tens of thousands of subscribers to your newsletter. If you go out and round up the best of the articles out there on the subject area you cover, and put them on your site for your visitors and subscribers, isn't this offering great value to them? Of course it is.

Now, if there is no duplicate content penalty, there is no problem. Google will simply give you no credit for the pages that are not unique, but they will not affect the ranking of the site either. In recent months though, Google has said things that seem to indicate there is now a penalty. This is apparently why some sites have been able to boost their rankings by removing excess content that is not unique. Among other official pronouncements, I found this from Google:

In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.

So the "perception" of Google's algorithms in regards to duplicate content can result in a downgrade of your rankings or the removal of your site from the results altogether. That's certainly a penalty!

It is easy to understand the general concept of a "good" site, and the idea that it should offer something unique. I wouldn't want it any other way. But I will tell you that I have removed other author's articles from many of my websites now, even though they offered additional value to visitors. Why take a chance?

There is more to this though. Google's guidelines suggest that you should not have repetitive content as well. These are pages that essentially say the same thing, even if they use entirely new words. For example, if you are the expert on how to get out of debt, you might have six pages each saying about the same thing, but each optimized for the a different keyword phrase.

"Get out of debt," has 49,000 monthly searches, "ways to get out of debt" has over 14,000, and there are many others, including millions of searches for "how do I get out of debt." You target six or seven of these. Now, if each page offers essentially the same information, would this have indicated an "intent to manipulate" rankings? Could it result in a penalty or the removal of your site from search results?

Now, let's consider why you might target all these similar keywords. Until the search engines are really good at determining meaning (they're getting better, but not good yet), a search for "eliminate my debt" will not necessarily show a page that is about "ways to get out of debt," even though it may be the best page on the subject. So if you are the expert, wouldn't you want write another page targeting "eliminate my debt" in order to offer this valuable information to those who search this way?

It is interesting that although Google hopes to encourage the best visitor experience at the sites they put in their results, they are discouraging exactly that in some ways. If you do not repeat your "how to choose a backpack," with a similar page on "how to choose a rucksack," the searcher of the latter might be denied the best tips out there. If you remove your collection of the best articles on a subject, you remove value and leave your visitors with the necessity to go find those articles one-by-one in dozens of directories.

In any case, I suspect that there will be a duplicate content penalty from this point onward, and even a penalty for having too much similar content. What the latter suggests is that keyword selection will be very important. In the past you might have optimized for numerous similar keywords. Now, to avoid a penalty, you should probably choose the highest-traffic one that you can reasonably expect to compete for. In the example given I would opt for "get out of debt fast," which has over 3,000 monthly searches and less competition than others, but also contains "get out of debt," which has 49,000 searches.

Google's official pronouncements tend to suggest that you should just produce great content and not worry about optimization, but this is nonsense. If you created the best restaurant out there and put it in the woods down a dirt road, nobody's going to pave the way to it for you just because its good. If you own "Zebra Landscaping," customers will rarely get past "ABC Landscaping," Allen's Yard Care" and all the others to find your ad in the yellow pages. Like it or not, we have to think about and plan for how our sites and pages will be found. That now means you have to avoid duplicate content penalties and the eventual "repetitive content" penalties.

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