Duplicate content

....what really is the penalty?

[ectect]

I've read quite a few posts where people are warned about not doing this or that in fear of the "duplicate content penalty".

Obviously there's a lot of discussion about how much content needs to be duplicated, who wrote what first, reproducing articles and press releases, RSS feeds etc...but not much devoted to the "penalty" itself.

We run one site with 2 very similar products, each has their own section on information, help etc and I guess from the definitions I've seen here they would be considered "duplicate pages" in the eyes of Google. However the subtle differences are certainly essential to our users to avoid confusion - that's why we've done it that way.

So, the question is, apart from ignoring the "duplicated page" - what really is the penalty? - And if it's just that duplicated content is ignored by Google then shouldn't we use a better term than "penalty"?

[jadebox]

It's not really a "penalty" based on the way I would define the word. It's just that Google doesn't want to list the same kinds of pages one right after the other in the search results. So, if a number of pages seem to have similar content, only one of the pages will be listed near the top of the SERPs. The others will get pushed down (perhaps to the point of not appearing in the SERPs).

In your case, one of the pages may appear high in the SERPs for a specific query, but the other might not because Google would see them as being too similar. Google might list the other pages when the visitor clicks on the "Similar Pages" link.

-- Roger

[ectect]

Roger, that's more or less how I see it too but if you are providing content for the user rather than trying to game Google needs then it's not really a penalty, is it? I was wondering if there was more to it than content being ignored.

[texasville]

In my experience, google chooses one and the rest go "supplemental". It's all automated so google can't determine that you are doing it for the user.