Duplicate content is a serious offense that can cause penalization. It is something that can leave many website owners confused and uneasy about their website development project. Getting original and unique content at low cost can be quite challenging. In this case, we should be able to separate the common myths from the real truth. Duplicate content isn’t a black and white area. In fact, Google sometimes appears vague and a little coy on this subject. It is often said that Google will penalize any website that has duplicate content. In reality, this can’t be implemented directly. In fact, much of the Internet is based on syndicated network and duplicate content is actually quite common. It’s actually in Google’s best interest to penalize all websites that republish content.
As an example, news portal and press release platform thrives on shared and syndicated content. Many popular news websites often have identical or at least, very similar content. They may add some slight variations, but the syndicated content is usually identical word for word. If all websites with duplicated content is penalized, the Internet will be a much quieter place. Even so, it is clear that duplicate content can really hurt us. So, there’s still an official penalty for websites that have duplicate content. This is particularly true for new websites that have only duplicated content. Google loves websites that have unique and original content. It means that if our content is purely original, we could be sure that it will eventually be indexed.
It is very easy for Google to detect duplicate content. It could find out the original content based on the date of publication. So, it is not possible for older websites to get outranked by newer websites that steal the content. A common way for websites to get content easily is by harvesting from RSS feed. When we do this, we add zero value to the online community and if we do this often, our website can be seen as a spammy platform. Of course, it is still quite subjective to determine whether our website is spammy. Even if we are still unable to deliver very interesting content, it is important to work harder to create highly original content. So, we should avoid the temptation of using content scraping tools that simply copy articles from RSS feed.
If we do this, we will have zero or even negative value in return. Google may refuse to index any of our webpage, because it offers very little value. This is quite understandable because there are also hundreds of other websites that are using the same content. It means that there’s no reason for Google to put us in the index. Content mismanagement can cause problems in search engine ranking. WordPress is a very easy platform that we can use. It’s easy to use, but can also be manipulated easily. Improper use of content in CMS can also confuse search engine. The same piece of content can be stored in Category, Author, Archive and Tag sections. This will confuse Google and it won’t know which content to rank.
