Clint's Web Marketing Blog

One of the most frequent issues or concerns I talk most about with my clients is duplicate content. Is it true that Google will penalize you for your duplicate content? Simply, yes they will.
Google has a webmaster help center and has a very good publication about duplicate content. Also check out the webmaster central blog where there is a great post about duplicate content as well. I suggest reading both as the information you read there is straight from Google. Because this information is out there, I don’t want to sound like a broken record on this issue, so I will just cover a three points.

1. “How to check for duplicate content?” It is a true pain in the butt to check for duplicated content, but thankfully someone a lot smarter than me has come to our rescue - www.copyscape.com. You can enter the URL of the page you want to check and CopyScape will return a list of pages that Google has indexed that contain text that is duplicated on your site, or for more detail you can subscribe to their copysentry service. I get asked all the time about “What percent of a page or website has to be duplicated before I get penalized?” the answer is 13.3333%. Sorry, just kidding, unfortunately none of the search engines reveal this information, mainly because if they did people would know the exact line to get to before they crossed it and would inhibit the search engines’ ability to prevent duplicate content.

2. “How can I make sure I don’t have duplicate content?” Simple, make sure it is written by humans, completely different from any other combination of letters, symbols or words on the web and clearly not manipulated or just reorganized. Here are a couple tips to avoid having your content duplicated:

• Make sure that your content is copy written exclusively for your use.
  
• If you have multiple domains that point to the same website content, take advantage of permanent redirection. (301 status report) This informs the spider of the redirection so they understand you are not putting up duplicate content.
  
• When you find duplicate content in your website, rewrite it in your own words so that the search engines can reindex the page with the new, original content.

3. “What to do if you feel someone has duplicated your content?” You can report the duplicate content issue to Google under the DMCA guidelines they provide at http://www.google.com/dmca.html

If you have any question or want to discuss in-depth your situation I would love to hear from you.