You Ask, I Answer: Dealing With Duplicate Content and SEO?

In today's episode, Simone asks, Does Google search ding us for duplicated content? Or should I just throw this out the window and let my editorial team publish the same content across multiple sites? So on the topic of duplicate content, here's what happens with Google. Um Google looks at uh a piece of content and kind of fingerprints it and then looks around at its catalog and sees uh where else it has seen this. And then based on that, it tries to figure out which one is the most authoritative, which one is the one that will give the user the best experience.

And so it's going to take into account things like reputation, uh, expertise, trustworthiness, all these uh ranking signals that it's come up with that will help it decide when it shows a page, because it's gonna show the best results, not gonna show all the results uh it picks up. It'll show the best result in a Google search query to the end user. The trouble with syndicated content, where you take a piece of content and you you pitch it everywhere and uh you throw it on every blog, uh and you know, get reporters to to publish it, etc. If if you can if it's impossible these days, um is your site may not be the best choice. Even if it's your content, your site may not be the best choice.

If you have a piece of content and you put it on uh it's on your blog and it's on, say, the New York Times, just by virtue of reputation and user interface alone, who's gonna win? Probably Google is going to see the New York Times version as the authoritative version, saying this is clearly uh the most reputable authoritative site. And you your content will get consumed, but it will not get consumed on your site, and it will not benefit your site because a better ranking site has taken that uh advantage. So when you are publishing content, there's two ways to get around this. One, don't publish it elsewhere, right?

Uh that's by far the easiest solution is if you've got something that you've invested a lot of time in and you really want it to contribute to your site's uh search engine optimization efforts, your SEO efforts, keep it in your in your wheelhouse, right? Don't let other sites uh have that same piece of content. You might create an extract or an abstract or a summary, um a shorter version, you know, much shorter that links back to your site, and that's a great way to do that. It's a great strategy, but don't give away the whole thing. The second way, which is less reliable, um and therefore somewhat more challenging, is when you publish the piece of content, A, make sure it's on your site first by a substantial amount of time, like uh at least a day, ideally a week, and use uh what's called the rel canonical tag.

Uh the rel canonical tag is a uh meta tag that goes into your website uh for that piece of content. Ideally, it's set up as a uh a part of your content management system, so it's on every piece of content, and it basically tells Google this is the original piece of content. You may see this other places, but this is where it appeared first, and this is this is who the owner of this piece of content is. Now, the challenge with that, of course, is that if you just hand uh uh some another blog, that same piece of content, they put it on their website, uh, and they have the same rel canonical tag turned on in their CMS, and now you have essentially you're back to square one. You have two sites battling it out.

That's why the timing is important, making sure that it appears first on on your site, because logically, if it appears first there, and Google fingerprints both and says, well, this one appeared earlier, the system knows that that is more likely to be the original piece of content. So the timing difference combined with RHEL Canonical can help. But fundamentally, don't give away the best stuff to other people. Right. Give away the stuff that's okay that helps establish your reputation, that helps uh broaden awareness.

But for the things that are your crown jewels, they they belong on your site and your site alone. So make that decision when you're when you're building your content strategy. What are we going to give away? What are we gonna uh rent, essentially, and and by that I mean those abstracts as extracts, the short versions of your your better pieces of content, and what are we just not going to give away? The other thing that uh you may want to look into is if you've got people who are taking content from your site without your permission, uh you can file uh copyright infringement uh claims with Google, take down notices and such saying, hey, this site is scraping our stuff.

That in itself is a full-time job because there will be plenty of sites that will scrape your stuff, uh, and it takes a while to to pursue them, but certainly anything that's scraping your your big stuff, you might want to to get like a virtual assistant or somebody to go out and chase those sites, um, filing those claims with Google, sending down takedown notices and cease and desist notices and all that stuff. Um that takes time and money. And I would only say that would be a problem if you notice it when in your search engine uh rank uh monitoring tools. If you see sites that you're competing with winning on keywords um that lead to scraped content that is yours, that would be I sort of the threshold I would say where you'd want to go out and pursue those those folks who are doing that because that obviously is causing harm to your business. If it's not causing harm, if you know some bot farm has scraped your entire blog, and it's showing up in monitored links uh in your in your SEO tool, and their like domain authority is like two and and stuff, and and you badly outrank them, then it's not an issue.

So that's duplicate content. A lot of people refer to uh a duplicate content penalty. There is no penalty, right? Google does not say we're gonna punish you for for having duplicate content. Google is simply going to say we're going to find the best version of this piece of content.

So your site will not incur some kind of like mysterious penalty and you know vanish from search rankings. That kinda happened a long time ago, and it is sort of stuck with uh people who uh have not kept their SEO knowledge up to date, but that is no longer the case and has not been for a very long time. So that's that's duplicate content. Be careful where you be k ultimately be careful who you let borrow your stuff. Same as anything, right?

And don't let people borrow your best stuff. If you have follow up questions on this, please leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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