I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen some overly excited expert proclaim just how bad duplicate content is – and how you’ll disappear forever from Google’s index if you have any.

Seems a bit odd when you consider how many sites syndicate content these days, from the BBC and CNN to ma and pa sites, everyone’s getting their content out there as much as possible.

Ezine articles wouldn’t even exist if there weren’t hordes of webmasters all wanting to take the duplicate content and publish it!

So, will duplicate content really get you penalized? Who should we ask? There are any number of self-proclaimed experts hanging out a various webmaster and internet marketing forums. Just spend more than a day at any one of them and watch the same discussion take place many times.

We can’t ask them, so who do we ask?

How about Google?

Here’s what I read from Google

The most important things to know about duplicate content are:

• Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show if your sites includes duplication. If you don’t want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.
• Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.

If you’d like to read Google’s full post you can do so here.

So, does this mean it’s safe to just put up any old scraped content then? Well, no not really. You still need good content and their own advice makes it clear that unique content is always likely to do better than duplicate content, so it’s worth the effort to be unique. You just don’t have to spend sleepless nights that you’ll disappear from the search engine if you have some content that also exists elsewhere.

Of course, if your whole site is nothing but scraped content you might still have problems, but that’s a whole other post.

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5. Google neglecting your site? Add a blog.