You've heard about being 'penalized' for duplicate content on your website but do you understand what this really means. Or does the thought of being penalized paralyze you into not doing anything?

I found an article that does a pretty good job of explaining what is meant by 'penalizing' you for duplicate content. Take a look for yourself.

Webmasters are afraid these days. They thread the online road with much caution, no thanks to Google's mysterious algorithm which is never written in stone. Just when someone thinks he's about to break the code, Google changes the rules, and the air of mystery thickens... as well as the paranoia.

Take for example the fear about duplicate content. It is widely believed that duplicate content, or having the same content as other websites, would penalize your own website by getting de-indexed by the most widely used search engine in the World Wide Web. And since 80% of your website's traffic would eventually come from the search engines, such a penalty can be fatal for your online endeavors.

But fears about duplicate content are often caused by lack of understanding more than anything else, which has led some experts to state, in non-categorical terms, that duplicate content is actually a myth, nothing more, nothing less.

Will Your Website Get Banned If It Contains Duplicate Content?

Your website won't get banned. But your pages that contain duplicate content will not be fetched for relevant search engine queries.

By duplicate content penalty, the "penalty" only refers to filters which Google utilizes so that pages with duplicate content won't appear in search results. The website as a whole will be spared.

Will RSS Feeds Be Considered As Duplicate Content?

Yes. But your pages that will display them won't get banned. It must be remembered that search engine spiders crawl through your pages regularly, not just once. RSS feeds change, depending on the source. If ten or more pages are feeding off the same source via RSS, it would only mean that Google will not display the particular page that's displaying the same RSS feeds.

This is the only penalty. The page will be filtered. Your website won't get banned.

But again, RSS feeds are dynamic. They won't lead to this result all the time. Also, the sheer benefits that RSS can provide for your website's chances of figuring prominently well in search engine results far outweigh the consequence of being declared as duplicate content.

Additionally, there are many ways by which you could go around this potential problem. Displaying the headline and the first sentence of your RSS feeds, for example, and sourcing them out from different origins, would avoid the duplicate content filters since the content therein would be too minimal to consider. How Come AP News Pieces Don't Get Filtered Out?

One question that has bugged many webmasters is why Google doesn't seem to filter out general news pieces. For example, a newswire piece on Hurricane Katrina, published in over 1,000 websites, would still appear in search engines.

Further testing, however, would reveal that some pages are indeed filtered, only, these pages have the lowest page ranks. It seems that pages with a page rank of 3 and higher are spared from the filters. Perhaps, Google assumes that since these pages have "paid their dues," they deserve the benefit of the doubt that their duplicate content's usage is merely academic in nature, and not meant to blatantly pad up the page's length and value.

Final Analysis

No one can know for certain how Google duplicate content filter really works. All we could hope to le.arn, we could only base from studies of the consequences experienced by webmasters concerned. Nonetheless, based on the data we could gather, Google's algorithm really does take notice of duplicate content. But it will not ban your website. In fact, it is not even automatic that the particular page will be filtered out from the results pages. Other factors are at play, your website's page rank being one of them.

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