Duplicate Content - Should You Worry

Over the past week, I have been spending time on Google’s website researching how search engines may see our blogs.

Today’s Lesson

One issue that caught my eye, is duplicate content in blogs.

With WordPress, we have duplicate content throughout our blogs. One post can be “recorded” in many different areas…i.e. monthly archives, recently written, favorite posts, feeds, articles, and in numerous categories. That’s a lot of duplication in a blog.

To quote Google:

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

* Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
* Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
* Printer-only versions of web pages

To address this issue, Google tries to “filter” some of this duplicate content, in an effort to give readers the best results for their search results. However, duplicate content can unknowingly, be classified by Google, as a deceptive practice.

Today’s Assignment

Review your site.

Where do you have duplicate content?

Do you think your site could be “labeled” as deceptive?

Does your blog platform/program, address this issue?

I have looked at my sites and found numerous areas where I have duplicate content. Based on my finding, I have made several adjustments.

Future lessons will address how I am dealing with these issues.

Posted on October 29, 2007
Filed Under Archives, Blogging Lessons |

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4 Responses to “Duplicate Content - Should You Worry”

Asako on October 29th, 2007 8:05 pm

I have made a mistake with it before. When you have two blogs, you may write an article that is close to an article on another blog. I think when I did so and linked them to each other, Google got confused and penalized my site.

Or I heard if you would submit your article to someone else, you should make sure to change the article so that it would not upset Google….

Thank you so much for all these warnings on how to damage Google rankings!! There are so many traps, I can not follow them all…
Barbara on October 30th, 2007 10:31 am

Hi Asako,

There is a lot to learn, in order to blog “properly”. As with anything, it’s important to know the correct procedures, however, blogging can be somewhat forgiving, as long as we post frequently and have valuable content.
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