The Google Duplicate Content Penalty. Myth or Fact?
The Google Duplicate Content Penalty. Myth or Fact?
I’ve watched a few arguments about this one in the last two years, and there seems to be a fair bit of variation of opinion on it. While I don’t really want to state emphatically that it doesn’t exist, I’ll tell you why I don’t see it as an issue and often act as if it doesn’t.
Here’s my first point: One man’s word, and a bit of logic.
John Mueller, a Google Webmaster of significant standing and whose word is quite reliable when it comes to how Google works, is known to have said that when Google sees duplicate content, the issue they want to avoid is having two pages in Google search results that basically offer the same content. From a user perspective, duplicate content in search is not ideal because as a user you probably want a variety of choices in the search results, not the same thing several times over.
But let’s say there are two or more URLs somewhere on the internet that have exactly the same content. What happens to these if they are both equally well-matched to a search query? Here’s my take on it:
If the two pages (or maybe it’s actually really just one page via two or more directory paths) compete against each other in search results, then one will win and show up in search and the other will lose and may not render any search result at all. Does that mean the second page was penalised? Well, no. It just means that the first page had some edge that we are yet to discover.