What is considered duplicate content? Google tells….

I often tell my clients how important it is to have unique content, while at the same time warning them of possible negative issues involved with duplicate content. Google has never been perfectly clear on the issues of but yesterday Adam Lasnik of Google posted on the issues of duplicate content. 

Here’s a clip from his post:

“What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional or at least not malicious in origin: forums that generate both regular and stripped-down mobile-targeted pages, store items shown (and — worse yet — linked) via multiple distinct URLs, and so on. In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.”

He goes on to mention that if you do have duplicate content on your site(s) and Google perceives it to be created with intent to deceive then you risk potentially being penalized for this. Most of the time however, Google will allow one version of the page considered to be duplicate to remain in their index and they’ll remove the other versions of the page.

So, if you have a paragraph in a page of your site that’s in another site or page of your own site, does that mean it would be considered duplicate content? Not really. Search engines use many other factors to determine duplicity rather than just text in a site. For the most part, the way they treat duplicate content is meant to help combat the spam sites that scrape and use content from other sites. To be safe, focus on creating original, unique content and you have nothing to worry about. Read Adams post, it’s worth the read.