Duplicate content question

[trinity Investments]

I've see that Google and other search engines are "penilizing" for duplicate content... has anyone dealt with this type of thing?

On our website we have a couple of paragraphs for each specific area we work in... then a generic paragraph basically saying we have experience and we work for our clients... etc, then a couple of lines that say contact us with any question.

Is that to much "duplicate" content? Should we change it?

Thanks,

Enjoy the forum and learning a lot!

[linkbuildr]

That shouldn't be a problem. In my experience the dupe filter either isn't that great at figuring it out or is too backlogged

As long as you're not copying pages or articles you'll be fine.

[abcharlton]

My understanding of the duplicate content issue is that if Google finds the exact same article on the web 500 times with exactly the same links, it declines to give those links 500 pages worth of link juice. I don't think the whole duplicate content thing is Google punishing you for copying content because they really don't know who copied whom.

[trinity Investments]

I don't think Google Punishes you. I know they are trying to prevent Scraping of websites, but if they find duplicate content, then only 1 page (who ever they decide is the original Author) shows up in the SERP's rather than all the pages with that content.

[Joelrunner]

The "penalty" really only applies if your site has site-wide dup content in an attempt to make your site seem larger than it really is.

When you put an article on Ezinearticles or Goarticles and it gets syndicated to a couple hundred different sites, the majority of those articles will get put into the supplemental index - and the links won't count. The only "penalty" is the fact that you have a bunch of pages out there showing up as links, but the majority of them aren't actually passing juice. (Some might not even consider that a penalty because it makes it that much harder for competitors to reverse-engineer your site.)

I ALMOST agree with trinity investments about who Google decides doesn't get dropped into the SI. I don't believe they try to figure out who the original author was, but instead - the page that has the most PR wins.

[Joelrunner]

Quick tip on finding out if pages on YOUR site are in the supplemental index because of being considered dup content:

Run a "Site:" Command in Google for your site, and make note of how many pages Google has in their cache.

Then go to AOL & run the same site command. If the number is less - you've got pages in the supplemental index.

(AOL uses Google Data, but they don't use data from Google's SI.)

[Philman]

If you only have a paragraph of duplicate content, then you really shouldn't have a problem. Also, when it comes to duplicate content, the big G checks for it not just on local domains, but across numerous domains and IP addresses.

Think about it: if Google penalized people using duplicate content on their own pages, then pretty much every template-based website (including blogging platforms such as WordPress) would get penalized, as most of them will have duplicate content on their own domains. On the other hand, if you have an article that has been picked up by 100, 500, 1000+ sites, then chances are it will be flagged as duplicate content because a.) none of the content has been changed and b.) that same content is on numerous other sites, on numerous different IP addresses.

[kenna real estate]

I just spent about an hour reading google webmasters site about duplicate content penalty etc. Really good info there and many of the same things that has been mentioned here in the comments.

[Brett M]

I've seen duplicate "top 10 lists" show up in spots 1 and 2 in search results. So they're not always taken out of the index. However, I've read that the first site to be indexed is seen to be the authoring site.

[jessefriedman]

When you have duplicate pages, make sure you utilize the canonical tag to specify which page you want the engines to apply value to. If you have duplicated content, dont worry too much about it unless your are overdoing it.