WILL DUPLICATE CONTENT PENALISE ME IN GOOGLE?

HOw much coPIED CONTENT CAN I USE?

Can I copy Content?

As far as duplication is concerned the simple answer is none. You should certainly make sure all your titles and descriptions are bespoke. 
And if you're not sure use this page title and description checker which you can use to check loads of urls within a site.
But then what about actual on or  in page text content. Or Body content as we like to call it!

I get a few calls from people who think they can just copy their website and put it under different Domain name or URL, with NO substantial changes. NOTE: this DOES NOT WORK!

Google being a product that relies on it's quality which is defined by the search results it returns, is basically extremely vague on this topic.

If you want to read what google has to say on this subject please click on this link

It basically says that when referring to duplicate content it is talking about large blocks of copied or similar text and content either within one website or across two or more websites.

It also goes on to say that duplicate content is not grounds for action, and I quote, so sorry for the duplication........................!

"unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results." Google Webmaster.

SO what it does not say is will it penalise the whole site to some degree or will it penalise that page or subsequent duplicated pages!

Now just about every page within a website have a certain level of duplication, take this page for example.
The content to the far right is duplicated on most pages, the footer is duplicated across the whole site and certain parts of the header! Like wise much of the HTML coding is all duplicate and CSS file.

 So what is included then - just on page text? 

Well we are never going to know as this is top secret. but I hope to clarify some good a bad practices.

So how much is good and can we compare this accurately using a tool like similar page checker http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

Well I have just checked to pages which I know for a fact that are very similar on another website and this tool returned a 89% duplication. Which I thought wow that's high.

However both pagerank No.1 and No.2 for their main keywords!

So basically large duplicate content across websites can penalise us and affect our rankings.
And we all know........

Google loves fresh content

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WHAT ABOUT DUPLICATE CONTENT WITHIN MY webSITE

So what about duplication across a number of pages within one single website?

Well I have just proved you can get away with 89% but this is because both pages have unique Titles and Descriptions but also all the titles <h1> <h2> and <h3> are all different. All the Image Alt Tags and Title Tags are different and the contact forms. Also, although I am not sure about how important this is, all the inbound and outbound links are different.

Now I have looked at another site from a company that I have been doing work for and I have found they to have 89% duplication across a number of pages. 

But there are only two of these pages that seem to be indexed by Google and not very highly by Google.

Now this is where I have a few issues, the site is developed in wordpress and the pages that are being returned are basically extensions of the one page, over 36 pages of extensions. As they have that much content!

What makes things worse is the website then uses a filter for specific topics, which does not seem to get indexed.

However there are many more issues with the site from Duplicated Titles and Descriptions. To the way the pages are set up to return the same body of text. Which is substantial and would therefore in my mind would count as bulk copied or duplicated content.

But they return 89% also, so does that mean it is o.k.

UPDATE
It would seem that this is a common issue with a few of the wordpress themes and plugins Whereby within the site it returns searches, news, product, tags, categories and comment items under several different urls. either by using specific filters, or under assigning certain categories or by the way it archives items.

Example where the same URL appears under several different url stings

http://www.joebloggs.com/page-x/
 
http://www.joebloggs.com/product-category/page-x/

and

http://www.joebloggs.com/article-category/page-x/ 



Well please check back in a 7-10 days and I hope to be able to shed more light on the subject with some correction to some things which may be masking the issue further.

MORE TO COME......

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HOW MUCH CONTENT CAN I COPY?

Duplication Issues

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HOW GOOGLE WEBMASTER TELLS US ABOUT DUPLICATION

Google Webmaster does provide us with a tool to check some of this duplication. Under Search Appearance > go to HTML Improvements and here you will be shown short, long and duplicate titles and descriptions. There is a section here called non-indexable content which I have never seen any issues with, on any website. Is this perhaps the duplicate content flagger? Would be interesting to hear from people who have this section highlighted and perhaps the reason why.