Google Addresses the Duplicate Content Penalty

Over at Google Webmaster Blog they recently posted a new article on “Duplicate Content Due To Scrapers”. Duplicate content has always been a concern and this latest piece by Google is intended to calm the growing murmur of discomfort by most webmasters over their web copy being scraped and used elsewhere by third-party sites like MFA’s (Made For Adsense) blogs, syndication sites and just sites ripping off content like-for-like for whatever reason.

According to Google there is nothing to worry about because they have it covered. Somehow, I’m not feeling all warm and fuzzy on that statement. I do concede that in the majority of cases G gets it right but I have witnessed damage by duplicate content not once but twice on sites recently.

In both cases the sites literally dropped from Google’s search engine ranking positions like a stone through water. I was contacted to help figure out the problem and find a solution.

Site 1 was easy to remedy, although time-consuming, I just rewrote the full sites content again from scratch in some instances and messed with the paragraph layout of other less-weighted pages then submited a re-inclusion request to Google – it worked a treat and the site enjoys healthy rankings to this day.

On site 2 I had some work to do because I had no access to the site at all. It was one of those funny set-ups where the web design company hordes the access codes and denies entry to even the site owner. Site 2 had been scraped badly and TBH if it wasn’t for Yahoo and MSN driving traffic it would have been a ghost-site. A carefully worded re-inclusion request (it took about 5 drafts to get right) to Google did the trick and it was released from the duplicate contents filter clutches and ranking well again. Although, for the bigger keywords where it had a history of traffic its still in no-man’s land.

The main theme here is that although Google is great at spotting whose the original source and whose is the scraped source there are still cases where innocent sites are being penalised heavily. By contacting Google on each individual case helped rectify the problem in just a few weeks. But the site owners on both seperate occasions were caused undue stress as their business took a nosedive thanks to the duplicate content filter (penalty).