Website Promotion Article
Is there a Google Duplicate content Penalty?
I like to keep myself updated on all of the SEO and web promotion news and to do this I read various search engine related websites. Duplicate content is often covered as a topic of discussion with people debating about whether there is or whether there is not a Google duplicate content penalty. Now I suppose the only people who have the real answer to this question are the people who work at the top of Google’s hierarchy but here is a recent experience that I had which I think has provided me with enough evidence to come up with my own conclusion.
I have a large number of websites and I use some of these sites to test various forms of web promotion. One particular site was very highly ranked for the majority of its key phrases and would therefore be useful as a “test site”. I added part of the homepage content to three other websites and then waited. Nothing happened for a quite a while however I was in no rush; I continued to promote all of the sites in my usual way.
About two months later the original site plummeted in the rankings. From being in the top five of the Google rankings for all of its key phrases with the majority being at number one, the site was now down on pages five, six, seven and eight! One of the key phrases had dropped from number three in the rankings to number seventy-eight. I decided to keep calm – after all I knew exactly what had happened!
The so called SEO experts tend to advise the webmaster to sit tight in this situation and to basically do nothing hoping that this is just a mere blip or bug – so this is what I did. I personally would advise people to check their site for duplicate content and to check if any other webmaster has stolen/duplicated their content. I would also be questioning the webmasters link building tactics – have they been buying links for example?
After two weeks the website had NOT regained its high rankings and this is when I decided to remove the duplicate content from the other three sites. To my absolute amazement the high rankings returned within forty-eight hours!
So here is my tip of the day – AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT.