Is Duplicate Content Bad?
I’m a member of a forum called Webmaster Talk where that question has been asked so many times the moderators have probably had to receive psychiatric help to get over the trauma.The real way to phrase this question would be: “Does Google penalize a site for having duplicate content?”.
If that were the case, you could never quote another web site without being concerned about some sort of arbitrary penalty on the part of Google. How is Google to know if you are simply quoting Shakespeare or Walt Whitman like any one of thousands of other literary web sites, or perhaps publishing important safety instructions that may save lives?
Google Doesn’t Care About Copy Cats only Manipulators
You’ll be happy to know Google does not penalize sites for duplicate content. It has a lot better things to do with it’s time than running around looking for copycats. Google only penalizes sites for attempting to manipulate its search results.
Let me give you two examples of how duplicate content may be used on the web. One is an outrageously stupid attempt to manipulate Google’s search results while the other is a legitimate use of duplicate content:
The Failed Manipulator
Mr. web site owner has 10 domains and he decides to build 10 exact duplicate web sites in the hopes of gaining more traffic for his business. On each site he has 20 pages of information, each page is almost identical but has slightly different images and colors in the designs. All the web sites are hosted on a single server and all link to each other and all contacts go to the same ultimate mail box etc. Google quickly smells something fishy and these sites may be relegated to the deepest darkest depths of the search results if not outright banned for trying to manipulate Google’s search rankings and unbalance the playing field.
The Legal Duplicator
On the other hand, let’s say 10 different model airplane enthusiasts have web sites and they have each copied text off Wikipedia (legal under the GNU Free Documentation License) about how to properly build and fly model airplanes. All of these sites have identical information on a few of their web pages but other pages on their sites have unique and different content from each other. A few of these enthusiast’s web sites may even link together because they are members of the same model airplane club. Other pages on each individual web site make it obvious it is not an attempt to make exact duplicate sites for the purpose of manipulating Google’s search engine. The sites are hosted on separate servers. No evidence of an attempt to use content to manipulate search results.
In this case duplicate content would not be an issue. In fact, in almost all cases duplicate content is nothing to be concerned about and it is only on very rare occasions that Google takes any action against someone who has duplicate content.
Just Sit Back and Laugh
Building duplicate web sites or web pages is in fact a very stupid way to try and manipulate search results. Google judges each page on it’s own merit. If you have 10 pages with identical content and identical SEO, 9 of them would be relegated to the trash by Google very quickly and one might show up in the search results. Google basically says: “OK, we have one page with this data for people to see, we don’t need 9 more”. Even if all 10 of your pages were the perfect Mona Lisa of SEO, we only need to see one Mona Lisa – so that’s all Google shows us. Why go to all the trouble of paying to maintain so many web sites, pages and servers when 90+% of the pages will never be seen and you run the risk of being banned by Google?
This is why Google rarely has to act and ban a web site for duplicate content. It’s algorithm is extremely good at weeding out duplicates and the other pages never make it to the top anyway. So all that extra work was done for nothing. Kinda funny isn’t it?
OK Different Duplicate Content from Different Site Owners?
OK – let’s say you and I each have identical web pages, which one will Google rank more highly? Probably yours – I’m too busy lately to optimize any more sites 
Google takes into account how well each page is optimized and ranks them accordingly. The site owner who has done the better job on SEO wins, even though the page content may be identical.
The bottom line? Google only cares about duplicate content when the intention of the producer is to manipulate their search results. Otherwise have all the duplicate content you want – just be sure to optimize it better than the next guy.
If you’d like to delve a bit deeper into this, here is a link to the Google blog on the subject.
