Who gets punished for duplicate content?
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What happens if two domains have duplicate content? Do both domains get punished for it, or just one? If so, which one?
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Neither. Duplicate content is not a punishment. It is a relevance issue. Google simply thinks the duplicate site is a clone of many sites and there irrelevant. Some sites with greater authority it does work for - but google will only pick one site to display. Hence the other site considers it a punishment as they have the same content - but not displayed.
Think of it in fashion, people do not usually line of for mass market product, they line up for the limited edition. Google does not want to show mass market, the same thing over and over again - it wants to show unique relevant content.
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Hi Thomas,
The ill-effect of duplicate content isn't always logical, but generally it follows certain rules. Firstly, it's not so much a 'punishment', as search engines' confusion: if two pages are showing the same content, how does it know which result is going to be better for the user? Google, for example, are forced to choose what they think the best result will be, and if there's duplicate content it lessens your chances of being chosen.
Google don't specifically give penalties for duplicate content, but some practices are risky, for example scraping content from websites without permission. It depends how the content has been duplicated. (See this video from Google's John Mueller)
This post on Moz also clarifies the issues around duplicate content very well.
What type of duplicate content are you worried about? Do you own both of the websites for which you're worried?
Thanks, hope this helps.
Zoe
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