SEO commentators have long held that Google imposes a ‘duplicate’ content penalty on sites that have more than one instance of substantially the same content. Google’s Susan Moskwa dispels the myths in an article on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

The crux of the article is that, except for duplicate content that breaches Google’s webmaster guidlines, there is not really a penalty at all. Rather Google ‘collects’ the similar pages into a ‘cluster.’ They then decide which of the pages in the cluster should be shown to the searcher based on several factors, including link popularity. The article states that Google’s idea of what is the best page may be different from yours.

The ramification for the web master are to avoid creating duplicate content because it is likely that only one of the duplicate pages will get into the index. The article also cautions that Google will use your bandwidth when spidering multiple copies of essentially the same page.

Filed under: Uncategorized by Martyn Whittaker