While the main topic of discussions is the offer Microsoft intends to make for Yahoo purchase (45 billions of US dollars), Matt Cutts made a review on dilemmas caused by different misinterpretaions of so called ‘duplicated content’ — and penalties that certain site can sustain.
Of course, was with many other things, it happened also with the duplicated contents — nothing is black and white.
To sum up, sites with some kind of duplicate content (e.g. arrticle in different formats, print and plain version), but in fact they are benevolent and their SEO techinques do not give a reason to be penalized at all — these sites will not be considered as problematic because:
“typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site.”
Here are some advices to avoid possible problems::
1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.
And that’s the whole philosophy! It should be clear to everyone — if you respect a certain web netiquette and fair-play (respect towards search engines, bloggers and sites in general), you don’t have the reason to worry at all…
