In this post, I want to address a certain piece of misinformation that is being spread widely among Internet marketers. Part of the blame for this misinformation falls to article spinning programs and the way they are being advertised.
What I am talking about is the so-called “duplicate content penalty”. Apparently, Google has some kind of an issue with copies of the same content when it finds them spread across several websites or on several pages of a single website. If the Google bots finds duplicate content, apparently some type of penalty is applied. Even though this penalty is mentioned very often, it’s very difficult to find any kind of description of what this penalty does, exactly and who it applies to.
Of course, it’s all just a myth. And it can be easily disproved. Here are some simple examples:
Press Releases:
Every time the big story breaks and a press release is issued, that story gets picked up by countless news sites. Typically, the same news item will also be picked up by many related blogs. Usually, the original text of the press release is republished word by word by most of the sites. Despite this, you don’t see news sites and news blogs getting punished by anyone.
Song Lyrics:
How many sites exist, that let you look up the lyrics to your favourite songs? And can you imagine how often pieces of famous song-texts are quoted and reproduced on blogs and in discussion forums on the topic of music? Since the lyrics are always the same, this is the perfect example of duplicate-content. And once again, it’s clear to see that no penalty applies to sites like lyrics databases.
Content Going Viral:
Time and time again, some piece of content (perhaps a video or a joke) catches on with a wide audience and start spreading across the web like wildfire. When something goes viral like this, it gets republished and copied hundreds and thousands of times on many different sites. Clearly, this is a perfect example of duplicate content, but no penalties apply to sites that republish memes and viral content.
Despite this evidence, the myths about the duplicate content penalty are alive and well, and it might be due to a mis-interpretation of the Google search results.
The Misinterpretation:
One problem is that if you search for a piece of content that as many duplicates, the standard Google search results will only display one or two instances of this content. However, you can select an option in order to see all of the duplicates listed. The reason for the omission of some duplicates from the search results is that Google strives to display diverse and relevant results. Displaying dozens or hundreds of duplicate entries would not be very useful for the person doing the search. However, the sites that are not being listed are still indexed by Google and links from those sites still “count”, so there is no actual penalty in play.
The problem is that it’s in the interest of many producers of article spinning tools to keep the duplicate content myth alive. Fear sells and if you believe that you must spin and rewrite any content you want to distribute or suffer punishment from the big G, you are more likely to make a purchase.
Article spinning does have it’s benefits and purposes, if it’s done correctly, but a duplicate content penalty has nothing to do with it.
