Archive for the ‘Research’ Category
There’s a myth among webmasters (often of the newbie internet marketer variety) that Google will de-index you if you have duplicate content. Well, my friends, it just ain’t so.
About a week ago, I had to write some content about the two most (then-) recent bank failures in the U.S. (this search was in early June and uncovered events from late May; at least one other bank has been shut down since that time). The first Google SERP showed multiple pages on different sites, all with the same story.
I’m not just talking about the same story, rewritten. Fully four of the results carried the exact same text. Five of the rest had a rewritten version of the same story; most of them took huge chunks from the four dupe results just mentioned.
I went over to MSN’s search engine and got more varied results. About three of them had more substantial content than most of what I’d found with Google (the really good result on G was from Bloomberg.com, a standard in the banking industry).
One week later, the 1st page results in Google look a little better. But they still aren’t as varied and useful as what I found when I used MSN’s search engine. (I haven’t played much with Bing yet, but you can bet I’m going to.)
So yes, you can get away with duplicate content, but not always for very long. Then again, some key phrases seem to consistently show a lot of duplicate content results.
Also keep in mind that if you’re a writer, it really pays to use other search engines on a regular basis. Some of you already know this; it took me about a year to figure it out!
