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Duplicate Content on the Web – Is It Really Bad?

If you do much work on the world-wide web, especially if you are involved in internet marketing, you very quickly run across the idea of duplicate content and the search engines supposedly penalizing it somehow. I've been concerned about the quality of the documents you find on the web since I started surfing it, and I really believed that duplicate content just added to the noise in the system and cluttered things up. Just recently, I started thinking about how things work in the real world and I stopped worrying about dupe content altogether. I don't think it adds to the noise. I think the search engines are handling the issue correctly. And they probably aren't penalizing duplicate content at all.

The easiest way to understand dupe content is by thinking about a brick and mortar bookstore in the real world. Stephen King writes a book called Dumas Key (great book, by the way). You hear about it and go trundling off to the bookstore. When you get there you probably find 50 copies of the book. Duplicate content, by definition. Now ask yourself, is the system cluttered up by all those extra copies? No. You want a copy. You buy a copy. You read it. The other fifty copies that were in the store have no impact on your personal experience.

The only time duplicate content becomes an issue is if you had consigned a copy of the book to be sold. Then every book that was sold that didn't belong to you would be in competition with yours. Imagine if, instead of books on a shelf in the open you had to talk to a salesperson through a hole in the wall. You march up to said hole in the wall and say, I want a copy of Dumas Key. He grabs one off a big pile and sells it to you. That sales person is the search engine. If you had some books consigned at that store you would probably be looking for some way to influence the salesman so that he forked over your copy before any of the others.

Actually, that analogy isn't quite accurate. The situation is more closely that there are a lot of copies of Dumas Key. There are hard copies and paper backs and trade paperbacks. Some are illustrated. Some are new. Some are used. Some are just plain beat to shit. When you tell the salesman you want a copy of the book, he hands you a list of all those books, ranked in order by value. The ranking criteria are secret, but they definitely exist. The list of books run to several pages but very few people look past the first page. All the cream is on that page anyway. If there are two paper backs in the same condition they'll both probably be on the list, but way down at the bottom.

This is what's going on except that search engines deal in web pages instead of books. Forget about the duplicate content penalization myth. It probably doesn't exist. At least Google says it doesn't exist. The search engine is just trying to return the highest quality of results ranked in order of value. The whole issue is really only important to internet marketers anyway. Lets just say that, if your copy of Dumas key is a poor chinese translation of the original, published in paperback on rice paper and gnawed on by rats, the odds against it appearing on the first page of  a Google search are pretty damned slim. If you want to sell your book, add some illustrations, clean up the english and get rid of the rat chews. There's no conspiracy here, guys. Quality wins that's all. Everybody on the web gets to vote on your book, too. That's what links to your site are.

So, if you aren't showing up in the SERPS, you aren't being penalized. Your product sucks and nobody wants to vote for it. That's all. So get your shit together.

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