| Is There Such A Thing As Duplicate Content Penalties In Google, Yahoo and Bing? |
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The short answer is that this is not the case. Duplicate content penalties do not exit, and my interpretation of this point is as follows... Google and staff who are employed at Google sometimes throw the SEO community a bone and this time they have actually made it quite clear that duplicate content penalties do not exist. They have openly acknowledged this fact online and in their blogs and webmaster area. Your site will therefore NOT be struck from the rankings should you openly or mistakenly republish content already published by another author. ePage Solutions would recommend that you do in fact contact the author you are publishing to ensure that they are aware that you are using their content and at the very least post a return link to the page on their website where the original content was initially posted. That's only good manners and it also shows your readers that you have nothing to hide and republish great content for their benefit should you come across it. (How else would they find it? The web is about sharing information after all.) Now here is the reality behind the scenes of republishing content that is already available from other website's on the internet. You may not have physical penalties imposed, but behind the scenes your content will more than likely be ignored by the search engines including the BIG three, Google, Bing and Yahoo. In my book that's a type of penalty as you take the time to set up your new web page, upload it to your servers and add images etc. The goal of creating new content pages is to increase traffic and build inbound links to those pages and clearly if you publish duplicate content this will not happen. You could say that you have jut wasted your time then wouldn't you? Again no, not entirely. Duplicate content may not bring you new traffic, but it will provide your site visitors with interesting information that you believe they should be aware of. And that's GREAT news for your visitors. Now if you have published several versions of one page on your own website due to page and site structure changes then Google will simply ignore the duplicates and pick one version which it favours. To remove the problem you could use 301 permanant redirects. The dothtaccess file would be the safest way to do so or via your Sef404 in Joomla is another way if you do not have access to your dothtaccess file. If your publishing articles on eZines as the author then you may well wish to publish your own articles on your website. Since all the other articles on the ezines return a link to your website, the chances are that you may very well receive some traffic from these pages, but remember that the ezine site where your article is also published from the very beginning to have a direct link to the page on their website with yo9ur article so they may well be generating as many return links to the article as you are, hence it's touch and go who will rank for that article. Naturally since link building is the main objective, i forego republishing the articles on my clients website's at the moment, be that good or bad who's to say really. What this does mean however is that the visitors to my clients sites do not get the benefit of these articles. My reason for that is that if offer an article to other site owners then I personally feel that in good faith they deserve not to be competing with my clients sites for a listing to that article. I am happy for them to get traffic and share that traffic with my clients site as a referral. What should you do? It's your choice. Either way your in charge and you are free to publish duplicate content providing you are prepared to give credit where credit is due. |
