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Google clears up the "Duplicate Content" debacle

Written by Marco Conti Sunday, 30 November 2008 12:36

Are you afraid that your article's PDF version may decrease your ranking? Concerned about duplicate content? Google wants to put your fears at rest. Apparently, duplicate content is not, and it has never been, the big problem most people fear.

In a recent blog post on the "Official Google webmaster central blog" author Susan Moskwa writes:

Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.!

This is very good news and should help in mitigating the confusion sourrounding the issue. However, she warns that some types of duplicate content are indeed discouraged, such as obvous attempts to spam web users. She writes the following guidelines:

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Avoid... "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value.
Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Those are good suggestions and like most SEO strategies they are common sense.

The upside of this release is that we should no longer worry about our dynamic scripts generating multiple copies of our articles for PDF and print purposes. This has been a hotly debated issue in many Joomla forums and many CMS use the same system.

The only thing that it's still unclear to me is how Google handles RSS feed content. In this site I display several feeds on numerous topics, including Job Postings from craigslist and Web development Blogs. Ideally, these sources should broadcast only a snippet of their content, but many broadcast the entire content of the articles. For the purpose of a human reader 9and a search engine one would assume) content such as this blog from the official Joomla website. looks and reads just like any other content I display on my website, yet, it is an RSS feed and its owner has no idea that his content is displayed in full on my pages.

I try my best to categorize this content as a "Feed" and therefore no more mine than if I displayed news headlines from CNN, but at times even I get confused it's so well integrated in my site.

In any event, I am glad Google made an effort to put this one to bed and I am looking forward to finding out more about the rss feeds. Hopefully, the end of this controversy is close by.

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