Archive for January, 2008

This post was sparked from an article I read on ActiveRain called: Beware of Duplicate Content Penalties on your Blog by Roberta Murphy

Based on the comments in the article, there seems to be alot of confusion about duplicate content. There is a huge difference between onsite duplicate content vs. offsite duplicate content

Many of the commenters on Active Rain seem to have blurred the lines a little bit and neglected to make the distinction between the two. They are really 2 different issues.

What Roberta was referring to in her blog post is an onsite duplicate content issue. When you create a blog post and add it to multiple categories, you are creating duplicate content on the blog. Allow me to explain…

An Example of Duplicate Content with Multiple Categories:

When you write a blog post and include it in 4 categories, you are in effect creating about 7 pages on your website with the exact same content (article).

1. Blog home page
   
2. Individual blog post page
   
3. Archives page
   
4. Category 1
5. Category 2
6. Category 3
7. Category 4
   

You can see how adding a post to multiple categories creates onsite duplicate content… Ask yourself, would you ever create a website and include the same article on 7 different pages of the site? Probably not. So why would you do it on your blog?

Will Adding a Blog Post to Multiple Categories Create a Duplicate Content Penalty?

This is the biggest question everyone has… The short answer is NO. You will not be penalized by google for having duplicated content on your website.

But… some of the pages with the dup content may be de-valued in the search engine index. Google is not about to rank 7 pages well for the exact same content. Can you imagine what the search results would look like if it did???

The primary reason to avoid multiple categories for one post is to make sure that Google doesn’t de-value any of your pages. That is the real issue.