Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content can cause real problems for the search rankings of a website, and it seems that over the last few years the problem of plagiarism has increased manyfold.

Duplicate content can also be a serious problems for certain types of sites that have not themselves been maliciously copied, but rather, due to the nature of their topic, the content is none the less displayed on a large number of other sites, an example of this would be a website showing legislation and acts of law.

The exact percentage of a page that has to be duplicate before penalties are applied is not known, the search engines keep this type of information close to their chests, if they revealed this information they would leave themselves open to abuse.

What happens when Google Finds Duplicate Content?

When Google finds a page that it recognises as duplicate content  it runs a series of tests that are intended to successfully determine which copy of the content is the original, there are several factors that will be taken into account during these calculations and the below list of factors are highly likely to be amongst the ones used by Google:

• Domain Trust
• Number Of Page Links
• Does one copy accredit another as the original by linking back?
• Which page was spidered first.
• PR

Ok, so Google has now decided which of the copies is the original, but what happens to the pages that are now regarded as duplicates?

Well its a sad ending for these pages I’m afraid, Google has a special place for bad pages like this, and its called “the supplemental index”, a sort of badlands for web pages where trust is thin on the ground, and high rankings are even thinner. Google will still continue to index your pages, your domain will still be crawled by Google bot, although crawl rates for sites that fall into this category are generally very low. The simple fact is that Google is not interested in returning multiple versions of the same content in its results.

Generally speaking google will attribute the correct website as the original owner of the content, but what if things go wrong? Maybe you have a brand new website and your content has been plagiarise by a domain that has higher trust, PR, and authority than your new domain? Well there are two courses of action you can take in this situation. The first is to try to contact the owner of the website that is using your content and try to get them to remove it. The second is to file DMCA infringement notices with the offending websites hosting provider asking that they remove the content, you can also file DMCA infringement notices with the top four search engines and hope that they rule in your favour.