March 17th, 2011
The real reason Google penalizes for duplicate content.
Every SEO and web-marketing professional knows that duplicate, or copied, content will result in severe penalties to your pagerank and your search positioning. We’ve learned from Google that this is a simply a function of quality control and that multiple instances of the same article convolutes and dilutes the internet’s content. Well, this is true… without a doubt. But Google certainly has alterior motives behind this.
SEO Firms become successful by studying Google’s results on particular searches. They learn techniques that “seem” to be affective. Some firms spend enormous amounts of time and money analyzing results and the page factors that produce top position results. This is a daunting task because
A: Google doesn’t update ranks or positions immediately, and
B: It’s a trial-and-error approach with each change made to the page content.
Unless you have a way to directly compare apples to apples, the research and discoveries made can’t be definitive and hover just above an “educated guess.”
Let’s assume for a moment that we were able to take two identical pages and place them on separate domains each with the same pagerank. We would be able to make small changes to one of the pages and definitively determine what’s successful and what hurts the pages’ rank and positioning.
We would also be able to take two identical pages and place them on domains with very different ranking to determine just how important and influential the domain itself is. For example, we place an article on a domain that is less than 1 year old with a very low rank. We then take the same article and place it on a domain that has been around for 10 years or more and has a great PR. We would likely see a difference in SEO with identical articles on different ranking domains. Furthermore, we would be able to measure importance of domain rank, age, etc.
In summary, the duplicate content penalty Google has implemented serves an extremely important function outside of quality control. It blocks people from figuring out Google’s secret sauce… the algorhythm.
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