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If You Can't Ask Google, You Can't Know for Sure.

by TiffanyLambert
4 replies
I am sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo confused and I;ve decided that unless I can call up the Google staff on a CEO level and ask, then I'll just have to take a chance on who to believe - about as reliable as flipping a coin.

I have read thorough, in-depth, case-studied content on BOTH sides of the "duplicate content" issue - NO one agrees and BOTH sides have very strong reasons why they're correct - and both sides provide proof, too!

I hear that using PLR is going to get you penalized for duplicate content.
Then I hear that this is nonsense - it's only if you have it on the SAME domain twice.

This is almost what annoys me about online content - you can search for the answer you want and find it. You can't trust any one particular site for the truth unless you get it from the horse's mouth, and Google hasn't explicitly said, have they?

Ugh.

And yes, I want some cheese to go with my whine.
#google
  • Profile picture of the author Peter Adamson
    I can't point you to the exact interview but I have a niggling feeling that Matt Cutts has publicly stated that it is not that big an issue. Some other things to consider... Google can only guess who is the original source. If they penalise anyone they risk penalising the author. Otherwise anyone could damage a competitor by copying their content and putting it in 100 places...

    That said, I agree that there are a lot of opinions out there, and to listen to them you would think they all worked at Googleplex. Unfortunately the fact is unless G makes a clear statement, or someone has performed a reliable study with valid statistics to support their findings, this is conjecture and no more.
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    • Profile picture of the author Taylor French
      Originally Posted by Peter Adamson View Post

      I can't point you to the exact interview but I have a niggling feeling that Matt Cutts has publicly stated that it is not that big an issue. Some other things to consider... Google can only guess who is the original source. If they penalise anyone they risk penalising the author. Otherwise anyone could damage a competitor by copying their content and putting it in 100 places...
      Duplicate content question

      Matt specifically states:

      "What I was saying was: I often get questions from whitehat sites who are worried that they might receive duplicate content penalties because they have the same article in different formats ( e.g. a paginated version and a printer-ready version). While it's helpful to try to pick one of those articles and exclude the other version from indexing, typically a whitehat site doesn't neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site. However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index."

      Notice that he says it's even okay to have multiple versions on your own site. He doesn't mention any type of penalty whatsoever, but that the appropriate version would be shown based on PageRank.
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    • Profile picture of the author TiffanyLambert
      Thank you all!

      I guess that clarified it a little bit - not 100% for me. It seems they might be okay with duplicate content and just give a boost to the original if possible but while they say it won't hurt, they then go on to kind of discourage it and give a "maybe" on removing you from the index, etc. He almost sounds like a politician. lol
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