Internet Marketing Toolbox

By Peter Salis

Many are concerned about whether or not using PLR articles as their website content will get their sites penalized by Google for the “duplicate content” offence.

There’s much misunderstanding on this issue. One irritated established internet marketer wrote:
“In short I think that duplicate content was created to create a new market of buyers. You know all those content spinners that came out of no where. The whole duplicate content deal is nothing more than a scare tactic to get people to buy products that they think will keep them out of trouble with Google”

When you finish reading this article, you’ll understand better whether or not you may get penalized by Google for duplicate content.

What Are PLR (Private Label Rights) Articles?

First things first, in case you don’t know what PLR articles are: PLR articles give you the rights to add new content to, modify, or delete, the original copyrighted content in any way you like. They also give you the rights to add your name to the articles as their author.

What Is Duplicate Content?

If you buy some PLR articles and use them as your website content without modifying them, you’ll find other websites with the identical, unmodified articles as their web content.

Therefore many people conclude your website and the other websites have duplicate content, and believe these identical web pages may risk being penalized by Google. This is a general misunderstanding. I’ll explain later. Read on.

How Does Google Penalize Web Pages That Have Duplicate Content?

Many believe that Google may remove sites with duplicate content from its index, or may penalize their ranking. These are true, but it depends. I’ll clarify this issue in paragraph 4 below.

What Is Google’s Guideline On Duplicate Content?

To understand clearly the risk and implications of duplicate content, we must go back to the source — Google — for clarification.

In its Quality Guidelines, Google says:
“Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content”

It’s very clear that here Google is referring to YOUR own actions, ie YOU must not create duplicate content within YOUR own sites, YOUR subdomains, or YOUR domains. This specific guideline does not refer to other webmasters’ content that is identical or similar to yours.

What Does Google Say About Duplicate Content?

1. Google says:
   “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

   Well, Google doesn’t sound hostile in the last sentence, does it?

2. Google continues to say:
   “However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.”

   The keywords and phrases to note in paragraphs 1 and 2 above are: deceptive, manipulate, poor user experience. One thing Google hates is people trying to manipulate and deceive its search engine.

   It’s again clear that if you and other webmasters use identical PLR articles as web content, you’ll not get penalized by Google, unless YOU (never mind what other webmasters do) deliberately employ some SEO tricks to manipulate Google search engine to improve your rankings or get more traffic.

3. Google continues further:
   “Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a “regular” and “printer” version of each article, and neither of these are blocked in robots.txt or with a noindex meta tag, we’ll choose one of them to list.”

   Well, this is not a penalty, but just common sense. How would you feel if Google gave you pages after pages of identical or substantially similar search results to your search? Google would be giving you a “poor user experience”, wouldn’t it?

   There’s no penalty because in this paragraph Google assumes there’s no manipulation.

4. Google elaborates:
   “In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.”

   Google uses its hated words again: manipulate, deceive.

   In this paragraph, Google meters out its penalty — downgrading the offender’s ranking or removing the offender from its index entirely. Note that Google will impose such penalties only if you’re found guilty of manipulating and deceiving its search engine.

   Another key prhase to note in this paragraph is “in the rare cases”. It implies that Google doesn’t hastily remove sites from its index, unless… (by now you know the answer) in the rare cases, you try to manipulate or deceive its search engine. I’d like to think that Google is not in the business of punishing webmasters, but that it’s more concerned about preserving its quality as the leading search engine.

5. Google rids our unfounded fear:
   “Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results [oh, these words again — deceptive, manipulate]. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice [I’ve omitted this] listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.”

   Google makes it absolutely clear that it does not penalize you for duplicate content. Only deception and manipulation are grounds for penalty, duplicate content or not. Again, note that Google is referring to duplicate content on YOUR site, and not duplicate content among multiple sites owned by different webmasters.

6. Google is forgiving:
   “However, if our review indicated that you engaged in deceptive practices and your site has been removed from our search results, review your site carefully. If your site has been removed from our search results, review our webmaster guidelines for more information. Once you’ve made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.”

   Google gives us second chance, even when we commit the offence of deceiving and manipulating its search engine.

7. Now, what about other websites having identical content to yours?

   So far we’ve seen Google’s stand on duplicate content within your own sites. Does Google have a policy concerning other websites having duplicate content with yours? Yes, it does.

   This is what Google says:

   “If you find that another site is duplicating your content by scraping (misappropriating and republishing) it, it’s unlikely that this will negatively impact your site’s ranking in Google search results pages.

   If you do spot a case that’s particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request to claim ownership of the content and request removal of the other site from Google’s index.”

   This paragraph applies to duplicate content arising from stolen content, articles from free article directories (such as ezinearticles), PLR articles, news articles, etc.

   Therefore if you’re using PLR articles as your web content, you don’t have to worry about any Google penalty even if other websites use the identical articles. You have no control over what others will do to their websites, and so it would be unfair for you to suffer any penalty as a result of identical content found in other people’s websites.

   Of course, it’s wise to edit your PLR articles to make your web content different from other webmasters’.
   

Some Internet Marketers Just Can’t Give Up Duplicate Content Penalty

Sometimes when you browse Google search engine results and come to the last page of the results, you see a statement that reads, for example, like this:

“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1,002 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”

But if you click on the statement, you will see additional pages that show the omitted results.

Despite that Google says clearly duplicate content is not ground for action (see paragraph 5 above), some internet marketers use the statement of omitted results to assert that if you have duplicate content, Google will penalize you by omitting your site from the displayed results pages. No.

Google doesn’t say this is a penalty in its guidelines. Google’s penalty is either downgrading ranking or removal from its index (see paragraph 4 above). Google omits certain sites from its search results because of what it says in paragraph 3 and 5 above.

If a user is not satisfied after seeing 1,002 results (using my example above) and wants to see more, all he has to do is to click on the statement to have all the omitted results displayed. So, what’s the fuss? What’s the damage? What penalty?

Let’s take this further. Assume your site is listed as the 1,003rd result. Would you be excited? How many people will browse through 100 pages of search results? Many successful internet marketers suggest that for a site to be profitable it has to rank in the top 30. Therefore your site is as good as non-existent if it’s listed at 1,003rd. If so, does it matter whether or not your site is omitted from the displayed result pages? No.

Assume that your site is omitted from the displayed result pages. But some other sites with content identical to yours are displayed. To these site owners, there are NO penalties for duplicate content! So does it make sense to say that your site is penalized for duplicate content? No, you’re not penalized. Google simply chooses the better versions of content to be shown in the results (see paragraph 5 above).

I hope you see that those people who assert that omission from displayed results is a penalty for duplicate content don’t talk sense and mislead others. I wonder if they themselves have had any experience of duplicate content.

I’ve Built 23 Websites With 100% Duplicate Content

A couple of years ago, when PLR articles were just beginning to get popular, I built 23 websites of 23 different niches with PLR articles without editing a single word of each article. I built these sites for earning Adsense income at the time.

All my 23 websites are indexed. I have come across several other websites with identical content to mine. Those webmasters didn’t edit their PLR articles either. Their sites are indexed too.

Are any of my sites penalized? No. Are any of my sites omitted from displayed result pages? No, because all these sites are getting traffic, but thin though.

Do I encourage you to do what I did? No, because what I did lacks quality.

I’ve built a couple websites with original content (I use this “magic site-building system”). For some keywords related to the affiliate programs I promote, one of these sites ranks in the top 5 of Google search results, and top 10 in MSN and Yahoo. The daily traffic of this one site alone is more than the combined weekly traffic of those 23 sites with 100% duplicate content. Google knows what’s original and what’s duplicate content, and rewards me accordingly. Anyway, we’ll talk about building better sites some other time.

Duplicate Content Is Mostly An Attitude Problem

Most of the people worried about duplicate content penalties are those who use unmodified PLR articles or free articles from article directories as their web content. Why? Because most of us are lazy (I’m certainly guilty of this too).

What amazes me is that these people don’t seem to realize that web content built in this way with 100% duplicate content lacks quality. They don’t want to do the work to build quality, unique content to differentiate themselves from others, and yet they want their low-quality site to do well and worry about getting penalized for their duplicate content. They seem to want to have their cake and eat it.

Instead of worrying about getting penalized, why don’t they do some work to improve their web content?

A Google employee advised:
“In general, if you think you might be having problems, your best guess is probably to make sure your pages are quite different from each other, because we do do a lot of different duplicate detection… to crawl less, and to provide better results and more diversity.”

I hope you understand duplicate content better now, and realize that duplicate content isn’t all people make it out to be.

This article has been republished from here with the express written permission of Peter Salis www.gowebtutor.com

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