If you are a Webmaster, then you must be scared of the possibility, that your website might be penalized for duplicate content, even if it wasn’t your fault. In a recent post at the Google Webmaster Blog, Google has explained the concept of duplicate content and how it may or may not negatively affect your website. This post has been written keeping in mind the dilemma of duplicate content, that every Webmaster faces.

Duplicate content is a result of a ‘copy-paste’ procedure undertaken by a third party website without the Webmasters authorization. However, Google does point out that, because a Webmaster has no control over the copying of his content, therefore, Google doesn’t consider it as a violation of the Webmaster Guidelines. In the case of a duplicate content, Google employs a series of procedures to determine the original source of the content.

Google is able to differentiate between two major scenarios for duplicate content:

1. Within-your-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content which (often unintentionally) appears in more than one place on your website.
2. Cross-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content of your site which appears (again, often unintentionally) on different external websites.

In the first scenario, according to Google, a Webmaster has the ability to restrict the occurrence of duplicate content within his website. You should include the preferred version of your URLs in your Sitemap file to help avoid content on your site being crawled as duplicate. There is more information available about ‘Duplicate Content’ at two other Google posts. One is ‘Deftly dealing with duplicate content‘ by Adam Lasnik and the other post is ‘Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced‘ by Vanessa Fox.

The second scenario again touches the ‘copy-paste’ methodology, where a third party copies your content and publishes it in their website. Google takes into account a couple of factors to establish the ownership of the content. However, you need not worry about the negative impact of the ‘duplicate content’ on your website, because Google is quite competent in picking out the rightful owner of a ’scraped content’.

In case you do find the ‘duplicate content’ ranking higher than the original content, then you need to check these following factors:

1. Check if your content is still accessible to Google’s crawlers. You might unintentionally have blocked access to parts of your content in your robots.txt file.
2. You can look in your Sitemap file to see if you made changes for the particular content which has been scraped.
3. Check if your site is in line with Google Webmaster guidelines.

In most of the cases, the duplicate content doesn’t have a negative effect on you website’s presence in the Google index. A Webmaster would only be penalized for duplicate content, if he is found to have posted the content deliberately and with a malicious intent.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 1:48 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.