Duplicate Content is full of myths

“Will google ban my page if I duplicate someone else’s content?” Myths like these induce fear in the hearts of marketers whose aim might be to only publish the best content for their audience. There are forum posts, Reddit threads, technical audits, tools, and even SEO news websites that are putting up articles that show people clearly don’t understand how Google treats duplicate content. They tend to ignore Googles' guidelines on Duplicate content. But, firstly we should know about what exactly do people mean by duplicate content.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is content that appears on the internet in more than one place. That “one place” is defined as a location with a unique website address - so, if the same content appears at more than one web address, you’ve got duplicate content. Here are some of the myths associated with Duplicate content

1) Duplicate content will damage your rankings on search results

This happens in rarest of cases that a Duplicate content will damage a site's ranking. Unless you are writing a content which will be violating beyond the threshold levels on the following fronts:

• Volume: If there are hundreds of instances of the same text.
• Context: All the content appeared at the same time.
• Timing: It is your homepage on a brand new domain.

Many sites, including some of the most popular blogs on the internet, frequently repost articles which first appeared somewhere else. Most of them do with the intention of creating the best and credible content for their audience. Google won't rank you higher than the original content, but linking to the original content will make your content more credible.

2) Duplicate content will not generate engagements on social media

Taking blog content and posting it on different platforms on social media can bring in a lot of good results. If we optimize our posts according to the medium, be it on Instagram by adding industry-related hashtags, or on Youtube by translating blog post to a video or vice-versa will result in our content being more engaging. A good technique is to follow up blog posts with a video explaining the same thing, this will increase the session time on websites as the visitor will spend more time for the video.

3) Original content can be identified by Google

There's a lot of discussion on the Web about Google being or not being able to tell the original creators of a content piece. Some would say Google replies on publication date to track the authentic author, but multiple instances of hijacked search results disprove that. Dan Petrovic of Dejan SEO once held several convincing experiments, in which it was established that, when the scraper page has higher PR than the original page, it's likely to outrank the authentic page in search. Also, there are many other grey-area situations when Google is not sure about which version of the page to display in search results.

4) Translating your content in a different language

You are safe to translate and republish the same content in multiple languages. Don’t use automated translation though because it may get spammed. Use authentic human translation. It can be done through plugins or through content writers. It can even generate visitors to your website from different regions and can bring you global status. Duplicate content doesn’t just mean something that appears at more than one URL. That is a reasonable thing to have once in a while and just quoting another person will technically be duplicate content. It is about breaking the rules for your own gain. Google’s Detectives are smart and their human workers are even smarter.

Conclusion

Myths about duplicate content penalties need to die. Audits, tools, and misunderstandings need correct information, or this myth might be around for many years. Good idea is to link back to the publisher of the original content to make your blog more credible. A huge percentage of the internet is duplicate content. Google knows this. Google is good at finding the duplicate content. Do you think it will penalize a blog because they saw a page of duplicate content? They’ve been separating originals from copies since 1997, long before the phrase “duplicate content” became a buzzword in 2005. If anyone of you, out there has actual examples or real evidence of penalties related to duplicate content myths, we’d love to hear them.

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