It amazes me that there is still so much disinformation out there re: Google’s stance on duplicate content.  Myths die hard as they’re repeated over and over I guess.  I get these questions about it all the time.  So here you go…my take on duplicate content.

This information is taken straight from the mouths of Google engineers.

There is no “duplicate content” penalty.  Full stop.

Here are the two times when it becomes a concern.

1.  If you have a duplicate piece of content that is in two places and you’re trying to rank both of them for the same keyword phrase…one will likely not show up in the SERPS.  No penalty…no sandbox for the “offending” site (whichever one that could be!).  They just don’t want to show the same thing multiple times in the SERPS.  Google recognizes there are good reasons for duplicate content on the web…so there’s no witch hunt here, just an effort to make the SERPS more useful.  The example that the Google engineers used was as follows:

If you do a search on “fuzzy bunnies” and there is a wikipedia entry, plus the print formatted version of a wikipedia entry…only the first one will be shown.  However, if you did a search on “fuzzy bunnies print version” or something like that…the print version would only be shown.  Common sense really, and how you and I would design a search engine.

2.  The other time that we need to be concerned about duplicate content is when Google “senses” an effort to “spam”.  That could be the exact same article posted on 1000’s of sites simply to get traffic or to get backlinks.  When they detect that, they will usually simply “de-value” the links from these sources.  That’s it…no death sentence for any site !

In my opinion and based on information straight from Google’s mouth…these two scenarios are the only ones we need to be worried about with re: to duplicate content.

For reference : Video of Google Engineer discussing this