Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties with Google

Since Google's infamous algorithm update in December of 2004, many webmasters have had web pages removed from Google's search engine index because of a new duplicate content penalty introduced to help reduce the number of spam pages in it's index. One of my own sites has had numerous pages of valuable content removed from Google's index because of the duplicate content penalty. I have spoken with other webmasters who's pages were affected in the same way and I have come up with a with a few pointers to help you avoid this on your pages.

The duplicate content penalty can work against you in two ways. The first way is if your page is too similar to a page on someone else's site. In this case, it seems that Google will drop the page from it's index that it feels is least important, which could be your page. The second way that you could be affected is if two or more pages on your own site appear to be too similar. In this case, all or some of the pages will be dropped from Google's index.

Case Study

One of my clients has a site where they want to have a link to all the categories in the site on every page. There are roughly 60 categories on the site and each category has a 1-3 word name. That equals about 120 words of duplicate content on each page of the site. Depending on how much unique content is on each page, those 120 words could be a large percentage of the page's content. In my client's case, each one of their pages had on average about 150 words of unique content. So after you add it all up, including other words that might always show up like navigation menus and what not, this client's site had around 50-60% duplicate content on all of their pages. It's no wonder than when Google introduced this new duplicate content algorithm pretty much every page was dropped from the Google index except for a few pages that had enough unique content to dodge the bullet. Before the pages were dropped, many of their pages were in the top ten search results for numerous terms and Google referrals accounted for about 60% of all traffic to the site. You can imagine their dire situation now when all of the sudden they have lost about half of their revenue.

Prevention

The first and most obvious thing you can do to avoid the duplicate content penalty is to make your pages as different as possible. Of course, this is sometimes more difficult than it sounds. Webmasters will typically want their pages to match the style of the rest of the site. Sometimes this includes having a lot of the same things on each page such as links, labels, and other items that make up the page layout. Going for a minimalist design in this respect can make a big difference. In my experience, you will want to have very little else on the page besides the unique content that the page provides. Instead of linking to all the categories on the site like my client insisted on doing, link only to 3 or 4 categories that relate to the page's content. Also, never copy content from another site, even if you have their permission. Usually pages copied from another site will get dropped out of the index because the other page had the content first so Google will think you are the copier which is right.

Consolidate

Consolidation is another tactic that can help you in this respect. For example, if you run an e-commerce site and have an item in 3 different sizes and 2 different colors you should not create 6 different pages so that each item can have it's own page unless you can come up with a good, unique description for each version of the item. It's probably better (and easier) to consolidate it all into one page to make sure that you avoid the duplicate content penalty. If you have some pages with very little unique content, consider placing the information from two related pages on a single page. A case where this might work well is with recipes. Typically they are relatively small in terms of total words and two recipes might share very similar ingredients. For example, two pizza recipes are going to have a lot of the same ingredients to make the dough and may have the same kind of cheese too. In this case, placing both of the pizza recipes on the same page is probably safer than having them on two separate pages that would be relatively short anyway.

There are a number of other things you can do to prevent getting your pages dropped from Google index. Above all, avoid spam-like practices at all costs. After all, Google is filtering duplicate content to try and decrease the amount of spam pages in it's index. Make your pages as unique as possible.

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