Duplicate Content on the Web, Who’s Rules?

When it comes to duplicate content, it is easy to find many varying opinions. I’ve run across many forum discussions or blog posts about what constitutes duplicate content and whether or not duplicate content will get you penalized.

There are as many opinions as you can possibly imagine, and for the most part everybody is guessing or making educated guesses as to what duplicate content is and how it can affect your site rankings.

What it really comes down to though, in my opinion, is who’s rules do we need to play by?

I don’t like to use duplicate content for anything. I don’t like to take articles already published on other sites and use them on my own sites. I don’t like to take submissions from authors if they are submitting the same content to other web sites.

That’s my stance though.

It doesn’t matter what I think, what matters is who gets to set the rules and who gets to enforce rules.

Right now, I lean towards playing by Google’s rules regarding duplicate content.

Why? Mainly because they are my biggest source of traffic, and I’m trying to get traffic from their playground (their search engine). So, if I’m going to play in their playground, I need to play by their rules.

Also, Google’s duplicate content rules and notes just make sense. They seem to me to be like a “good practice” guide for anybody that is trying to sort out the best ways to use (or the best reasons to avoid) content that is published elsewhere on the web.

A few things that I like about Google duplicate content policies:

• They recommend the best ways to handle url variations and robots/spidering to make sure that there is no confusion for the bots on your web site.
• They outline the fact that content that is even partially duplicated can still be identified by their system as duplicate.
• They make Webmaster Tools available to help us help their spiders, which is very nice of them.

For these reasons, I tend to avoid the following when placing content on my sites:

• I don’t like to use snippets of text from other sites unless it’s a direct, relevant quote, and I link to the source.
• I prefer to write all content from scratch or have somebody write it from scratch. That way I avoid publishing something to my site that is already published on another site, word for word.
• I like to use plugins for WordPress (the main site platform that I use) to help robots better sort out the content on my pages and to help them steer clear of author or tag pages that may show content that is already elsewhere on my sites.

I mentioned that I use WordPress. WordPress is a blogging platform. And out of the box, it shows the latest posts on the home page. So, in many cases you could say that the home page of a WordPress blog is just showing duplicate content from other pages on your site. Google hints that this may be a bad idea, but I don’t think it really matters all that much, mainly because so many sites use that type of format. Many valuable, informative sites.

So even though Google mentions that as a possible negative (showing content on the home page that exists elsewhere in the site), I don’t think it really is anything to worry about.

Anyways, I’m done rambling now. If you are worried about using or handling duplicate content on your web sites, I would suggest reading through Google’s guidelines on this matter and form your own opinion. Don’t form an opinion before you understand how they look at this matter.