7 Myths About Duplicate Content Penalty

Content penalty is what set website owners on hooks for the fear of getting penalized.  In the past few years, Google has gone down on strict monitoring of the duplicate content on low quality websites. 

This effort on the Google’s part, fumed up certain myths related to duplicate content penalty.  According to Matt Cutts “25-30% of the website content is duplicate content” and one doesn’t need to get bothered by the figures unless you are planning spam.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is the term in search engine optimization which is used to describe the content that appears on more than one web page, either within a domain or across the domains. 

The marketers and brand owners mistakes duplicate content for penalty because of the strict supervisory measures undertaken by the Google.

Here are some facts associated with the content penalization:

1. Depends upon the intent; Duplicate content isn’t taken as the base for action, unless the intent is to manipulate the search engine.
2. Duplicate content doesn’t lead to penalization of the website.
3. To protect Webmaster’s reputation: The major concern behind designing of the Google algorithms is to protect the webmasters from getting affected by the duplicate content. These algorithms forms cluster and best of the cluster gets viewed at the top of the search results.
4. Google’s Adherence to Originality: Google aims at determining the best and original source of content which is relevant to the search conducted and display the results accordingly.
5. Plagiarized content affecting ranking- a complete myth!!: Non- original content will hurt the rankings across your domain. It’s completely a myth!! Many posts posted by the popular websites have appeared somewhere else before, this doesn’t affect a domain’s credibility.
6. Republishing your Guest Post on your website will hurt your website: Publishing Guest post on your website is indeed tempting, but the website owners and generally prefer everything on the website to be authentic to the core. But posting the content with the modification in the title after some time on your website and by using the canonical tag of the actual version you can republish it without any fear. 
7. Google preference to consolidation: Google by analyzing the user’ intent to browse the fresh content, choose to show a single version by consolidation.

Causes of Duplicate Content

There can be numerous causes for duplicate content:

1. Session IDs
2. Index pages
3. HTTP and HTTPS
4. Scrapers
5. Pagination
6. Parameters and faceted navigation
7. www and non-www

Solutions To Duplicate Content

1. 301 Redirect: Applying 301 redirects prevent the pages from having duplicate issues.
2. Canonical tags: The Canonical tags are used to consolidate the signals and help Google pick the website version preferred by you.
3. Rel = “ alternate”: This is used to consolidate alternative versions of the page which can be the language page or mobile version page of a website.  This helps Google identifies the alternative versions and consolidates the signals for different pages.
4. Acknowledge Google with URL parameters: Create a tracking link using destination URL, manually adding a parameter to tracking and assign URL parameters with Search Console.

The myths about content plagiarism needs to breathe it last and this should be rectified with the assistance of advanced SEO tactics and tools for building up the  base for clear SEO guidelines untainted  with the complex  web of myths. The need is for proper syndication of the websites through best implementation of SEO capabilities.