Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content?

Hi folks,

There is a popular myth about duplicate content, and that is that Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content.

Greg Grothaus of the Search Quality Team of Google cleard that Google itself is not penalizing you for it.

Google recognizes that most duplicate content is not created to be deceptive. There are of course exceptions, which are considered spam. They're being penalized for being spam but not for having duplicate content.

There are some issues that can arise that may negatively affect your rankings.

1) Your link popularity will be diluted. Backlinks pointing to several different URL versions of the same content, will make it harder to accumulate link juice for one URL.

2) User-unfriendly URLs in search results may offset branding efforts and decrease usability as well.

3) With multiple versions of the same thing, Google will spend more time crawling the same content, meaning it will have less time to go deeper into your site, and you run the risk of having content not get indexed.

Sorry folks, for the long absence... I can only say: Busy! - This caught my attention though!

@ sam09 - While I agree to what you are saying here, at least mot of it, I'm not so sure about the first part of your statement!
I must at least partially disagree to that, I'm just having a rather intense experience with duplicated content on one of our client websites.

Here is what happened:
My site http://www.eastpuertoricodiving.com/ was ranked #1 on Goggle for more than 12 month with over 20 key phrases.
Suddenly on July 23rd all these search terms showed another site at the top spot.
This site in question had been linking to our site for several month and we where featured on their site and had several links there; nice.... but...

...one day, in July 2009, the site owner changed his system and began showing the linked websites in a frame with Google Ads on top of each frame. Now the first spot in Google suddenly was our website in someone else's frame!
Meanwhile our site lost ground and is now between 40 and 70 for all key phrases around 'Diving Palmas'. 'Scuba Diving Puerto Rico' etc..

It took a month of fighting and several e-mails and lots of bla bla to convince the guy to either link back to us the way he did before or to remove our from his site. Only after we removed the backlink to his site, we where eventually removed. Well,
It took a while until Google removed the framed page, it now leads to a 404 page, from top spot. (I must say, the guy was friendly enough to notify Google to remove the page from the SERPs.
Now that it is gone, one of our press releases is shown on top instead for many phrases. The website itself though hasn't moved an inch back up yet!

Now the site might be either in the sandbox or trapped otherwise. Whatever, I'm certain that all this started with, and is heavily related to, duplicated content. Google obviously couldn't handle the frame problem nor see the duplication.

Now there are two reasons where this problem could have been created:

1. The site that showed our content in a frame is older than our site - age does matter! Our content was still seen as the best but the site which was older and showed the exact same content was precedented by the bots.

2. That's the one that better isn't true; Google likes sites with Google Ads better than the ones without.... which Google denies.
Since the the website is for a dive center in Puerto Rico and we are doing only the Internet marketing, there are obviously no Google ads on our site.

I'm looking forward to tons of opinions and if anyone has an idea how to kick our site back up, let me know your magic ;)

P.S. Only the Google Group SE are ranking the site back, the search results on most other search engines remain as before.

First of all you have to define duplicate contents.

1) People duplicating your contents with a link source is ok

2) People duplicating your contents for promoting their own sites or their own products are spam.

3) People duplicating sentences taken from your site to be under the radar is spam

4) People duplicating sentences taken from your site and copied on their hundreds sites are spam

5) People duplicating a specific sentence to multi pages is spam.

6) People duplicating your copyrighted work without a backlink to the source is spam

7) People duplicating sentences from articles and using that as a meta description is spam

So showing other websites in frames, adding Google Ads on top and make money with other peoples work by stealing their butter of the bread is ok? I honestly don't think so!

I experienced something quite different though. I was not penalized but I was prompted by Google that I had too many URL's for them to crawl and they're having badwidth problems when they crawl it, resulting to a crawl stoppage on their part. A lot of my pages are not being indexed now and the ones that are crawled are dropping.

One problem also adding to this issue is that my site had so many duplicate, or what google thinks are duplicate in my site.

@theemerchant you probably need more deep links in order to get google to crawl your site better, but if you have lots of duplicate content this wont really affect your traffic

I have a news blog for which I take all news form other sites linking back to them, in almost a month google has been good to me... :)

Is it autoblog?

Thanks for this informative back and forth about duplicate content and Google's responses to them. Please keep the thread going. I'm learning much from you guys.

Yeah, it is true that google penalizes sites for having the duplicate content.So develop the content as unique as possible and your site will be rank high in the search engine results page.

I'm still saying - Nobody is perfect - Google sometimes punishes the wrong sites! eastpuertoricodiving.com is still sandboxed after 6 month...

The other site got removed and penalized ut that didn't bring my site back up.

Duplicate content will not get penalized. What you need to be careful about is that your original  might not get indexed because SE only take what  they think as original content and leave the rest.  And you might have little chance of getting any rankings.

The problem is that after nearly a year, the site that duplicated our content has been penalized and put somewhat to nowhere land but the origina lsite is also still in the Google Sandbox playing with udders. ;).That kinda sucks. Writing to Google doesn't have any effect whatsoever.The question is What now?

I think google can't really tell which was the copy and which was the original. The site that duplicated your content may be penalized due to other reasons. And google can not be sure that your site is original.

Interesting but might be true. I thought that google indexes the website and save it's content in some way but... It is rather impossible. Even google have not so many discs to save the whole Internet's content ;) only Chuck Norris can do that.

if two site content are same so google will penalized one by one also not duplicate content if your content is not so google also penalized

Ya Google penalize the site if they have duplicate content...

xebecs yerk zarfs

They would hardly admit it though, would they? Some people seem to be under the impression that Google has a public duty to provide a "fair" analysis of the web in their search results. In fact, their only duty is to ruthlessly maximise their shareholders' profits. And it is not a crime to tell a lie accidentally make an incorrect statement.

Actually testing to find out the truth would be a nightmare.

The site I was talking about above has never been released out of the sandbox. Writing countless emails to Google for reconsideration, explaining all that had happened didn't result in any reaction of Google whatsoever. The site is still sandboxed and I fear only creating a new site with a new url will solve the problem. That's a petty because of the more than 10000 back links the site has. Meanwhile I found several other websites following similar strategies. The webmasters of these sites pick a region that has many websites and start copying all the top websites of that region. Then the republish all the content on these sites including the pictures (which they even put their watermark on) and these sites are to be found on the very top of Google for almost any key phrase related to this region. It's unbelievable thatGoogle isn't able to figure that out. But these top placed sites contain a lot of (stolen) content and tons of Google ads so everything is just jelly for Google bots.... How bad is that? :(

xebecs yerk zarfs

Google encourage people to report abuse. Have you tried that?

Tried it many times in different languages and never got a response, neither got the site re-established. Once a site is sandboxed you might as well start over. It's not coming back.

Most people use "sandbox" to mean the period between the flash of fame as new content, and the couple of months when it then disappears before finding its rightful place in serps.

Being "penalised" is the permanent disappearance.

it actually is a place between 50 and 100 depending how strongly frequented the keyphrase is. At least this is my experience after many years of internet marketing and seo for my own sites and for customer websites. Once the site drops out of the top 100 it's entirely penalized and not sandboxed anymore. I don't think there is a way back from there other than starting over more carefully.