Recently one of our clients came to us for advice on duplicate content. Running a travel company, they wanted to create a separate site for information specifically on one area of travel. This site will contain duplicate content in terms of having the same travel schedules.

This led us to think about the issue of Duplicate Content and whether or not this will affect SEO. The official advice from Google seems quite straightforward - don’t try to deceive search engines.

In terms of copying some of the same content into two different domains, we advised the client to keep each site unique and relevant. Spending that extra bit of time making sure that your site has the best content for their target audience will mean that you won’t even need to worry about penalties for duplicate content.

In a different situation, you may have an e-commerce site where you have different URLs pointing to the same content on one website. For most genuine sites (e.g. if it’s not a domain farm or a site that exists solely on scraping other sites), you will not be penalized for this and Google will automatically choose the best URL for that page to index.

Taken from the Google Blog,

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.

Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

Have you experienced any Google penalties for duplicate content?

Posted In:

Content, Google, Search Engine Optimisation