5 Popular Myths About Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one topic that's shrouded in mystery. There are a lot of myths about duplicate content floating around on the internet.

The aim of this article is to bust some of those myths and help you better understand what duplicate content is and how to deal with it.

5 Popular Myths About Duplicate Content

Below are some of the popular myths about duplicate content.

1. Duplicate Content Is When You Copy Content From Others

This is not true. Duplicate content is not always copied content.

Duplicate content can also happen on the same domain due to incorrectly handling of technical aspects like HTTP & HTTPS versions of a website, www & no www versions of a website, URLs with & without trailing slashes, product URLs using multiple categories, and more.

2. Using Small Texts From Another Content Causes Duplicate Content Issue

This is again not true. Using a small amount of text from another content does not cause duplicate content issues.

Here's how Google defines Duplicate Content

"Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar."

Google clearly uses the word Substantive in the definition. However, according to Google , there isn't any specific percentage of similar content above which your content will be classified as duplicate.

3. Duplicate Content Will Lead To Google Penalty

There is no such thing as a Duplicate Content Penalty. At least not as most people see it. Google has confirmed this several times in the past and even wrote a blog post on it .

So, if you have a technical issue that causes multiple URLs on your website to point to a single page, it will hurt your SEO due to distributed link juice, but you won't get a penalty for the same.

In fact, even if you republish a post from someone else's website on your website, it still won't attract any Google penalty provided the owner of the website does not file a DMCA request, in which case, the page in question will be removed from the index. But that's for copyright violation and not duplicate content.

Also, your website might be penalized if you scrape content from other websites. But again that's not because of duplicate content. It's because such websites are pure spam and set up with the sole intention of tricking Google's algorithm which is against Google Webmaster's Guidelines.

4. Google Always Rank The Original URL

This is another popular myth that needs to be addressed. When Google comes across duplicate content, it ranks the URL that it deems to be the most useful for the users.

In most cases, it's the original URL. However, there have been cases where scraped content websites outranked the original ones especially when they had higher authority.

So, it's necessary for you to periodically check for websites plagiarizing your content and file a DMCA for the same.

5. Duplicate Content Should Be Blocked By Robots.txt

Some people think blocking access to duplicate pages will solve the duplicate content problem. However, Google advises against blocking Google bots both using Robotos.txt or a no-index tag.

Instead, you should use proper canonical tags to tell Google which page should be indexed.

6. The Canonical Tag INSTRUCTS Google To Rank A Particular Page

Google does not use Canonical tags as instructions to rank a particular page. It rather sees them as hints from your side to rank a specific version of the page.

So, all you can do is add a proper canonical tag and then hope that Google picks up the right URL for indexing.