Does Duplicate Content Actually "Penalize" a Domain?

[ColeLusby]

Hi all,

Some co-workers and myself were in a conversation this afternoon regarding if duplicate content actually causes a penalty on your domain.

Reference:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459

Both sources from Google do not say "duplicate content causes a penalty." However, they do allude to spammy content negatively affecting a website.

Why it came up:

We originally were talking about syndicated content (same content across multiple domains; ex: "5 explanations of bad breath") for the purpose of social media sharing. Imagine if dentists across the nation had access to this piece of content (5 explanations of bad breath) simply for engagement with their audience. They would use this to post on social media & to talk about in the office. But they would not want to rank for that piece of duplicated content. This type of duplicated content would be valuable to dentists in different cities that need engagement with their audience or simply need the content.

This is all hypothetical but serious at the same time. I would love some feedback & sourced information / case studies.

Is duplicated content actually penalized or will that piece of content just not rank? (feel free to reference that example article as a real world example).

**When I say penalized, I mean "the domain is given a negative penalty for showing up in SERPS" - therefore, the website would not rank for "dentists in san francisco, ca". That is my definition of penalty (feel free to correct if you disagree).

Thanks all & look forward to a fun, resourceful conversation on duplicate content for the other purposes outside of SEO.

Cole

[dynamyt100]

This is a very interesting topic and as always we have no proof of the consequences from Google. I was always under the impression that should a page be seen as a replica of another page then the older page would rank higher in the SERPS. I was also under the impression that should duplicate content be discovered by Google that page would be flagged and penalized? I'm subject to correction because, as I said, there is no definitive proof relating to this at all.

[DirkC]

One of the sites we acquired syndicated content to other parties (when we bought them last year, we changed the policy, so all syndicated content now has a canonical url pointing to the original article). Some of these sites were better positioned for our content, but apart from that, we didn't see any penalties for doing this. If these small business owners don't need to rank for the content and they get if for free, it should be easy to ask for them to put the canonical. In our case, discussion with these sites was sometimes difficult as we were paid for providing the content.

Dirk

[ColeLusby]

Hi Dirk,

Thanks for your feedback.

In this "scenario," we were focusing on "small business owners" that were dentists. They don't want to rank for that piece of content; they only want the engagement benefit or the consistency benefit. Instead of a small business owner struggling to post content or write original content (and no budget to hire someone), they would use "duplicate content" on their domain.

From your feedback, it appears there would be no penalty. I didn't even think about just copying & pasting duplicate content from competitors.

Good points.

Cole

[DirkC]

I don't think you get penalised for syndicating content like this (it would be too easy - you just take the most interesting pieces of content from your competitor, post it on some anonymous domains and wait for his ranking to drop).

The main problem is that you loose control over which site is ranking for the content. Suppose one of the dentists in your case would be quite famous, because he's appearing quite a lot on television, or he treats famous stars and blogs about it on his site. By doing so, his site is quite popular, and get's a lot links from well known sites. In that case, it would be possible that his site is outranking the original site for this article.

For this reason, canonical url's were "invented" - so you can continue to syndicate content, without running the risk that this syndicated content is going to outrank the original site.

rgds,

Dirk