The famous “Google duplicate content penalty” is a permanent subject of debate among webmasters, bloggers, SEOs and the general Internet marketing community. No wonder the official Google Webmaster Central Blog publishes posts on this topic from time to time. A new one has been recently released and apparently it was meant to put an end to this debate. If it will succeed or no, only time will tell, although I have the feeling that it won’t.
Take a look at the article’s second paragraph:
Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.
Now read one of the final statements:
In summary: Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you’ve been duplicating deliberately, it’s unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty.
These claims clearly convey an end-of-discussion feeling, don’t they?
(Of course, I’ve omitted several details because I don’t mean to quote the whole article here. After all, I don’t want to duplicate anyone’s content — especially when said content has been created by Google’s team.)
It’s interesting to notice that several readers have left comments expressing their doubts on duplicate content. It seems that Google’s newest post on the topic wasn’t enough to make all webmasters calm down. I don’t know whether their team will produce more articles to answer the readers’ questions, of if they will be simply left unanswered.
It has also come to my attention that for some people the whole duplicate content issue is just a semantic debate. In other words: whereas Google claims not to have an actual penalty regarding duplicate content, the truth is that they do penalise webmasters; not calling it a penalty doesn’t change the fact that site owners are affected by it.
What do you think? Feel free to share your opinion in our comments form.
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