Google Search Quality Engineer, Greg Grothaus, presents the video as part of the Webmaster Outreach program.

Greg clears up one of the most common myths in SEM: the duplicate content penalty.
Heres how Greg explains it:

Ive seen evidence of people kind of get worried about this and thinking that -being omitted from the search results- is a penalty Google are applying on their site. Whats actually happening is that were looking at the query the users doing and were saying we want diversity in the results were going to show a user.

So if someone searched for fluffy bunnies we want to show, as maybe page one, the wikipedia article on fluffy bunnies but we dont want to show as page 2 the print version of the same article with the exact same text. So what were doing for that specific query, were omitting the print article.

How can you combat this? Here are some suggestions:

• Dont attempt to manipulate search engine rankings by deliberately duplicating content. If the content is changed in some way or additional value is added, then this is ok. But dont just copy another website word for word, Google see this as a big no-no
• Dont dilute your linking by backlinking to several URL versions with the same content.
• Make sure your URLs are user-friendly in the search results. URLs with useless parameters may offset branding efforts and decrease usability.
• Make it easy for Google to crawl you site. More time spent crawling the same content means less time to discover the important content.
• Pick one canonical URL for each page and ensure you link consistently within your site.

I have posted Gregs video here, so you can check it out yourself. Its about 15 minutes in length, so you might need to grab yourself a coffee and settle into your chair.

Do you have any other suggestions to avoid the dreaded duplicate content issues? If so, we would love to hear them. Feel free to share your tips in our comments section below.

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