Duplicate Content Google Penalty - Does It Matter?

Duplicate Content Google Penalty - Did the Washington Post Beat Google At It’s Own Game?

Now before someone run’s off and says I’m accusing the Washington Post of spamming Google through less than honorable SEO tactics, I found this little search query interesting.

I typed in the keyword search phrase ” joint venture with a newspaper” while doing some research for a project of mine.

Duplicate content and the Washington Post didn’t get penalized at all…even on the same site.

Interestingly enough take a look at the picture over in the left hand side. Now I’m just guessing here, but Google pulled in the URL from it’s News search section and decided to include this in Universal Search and included the already indexed url.

The #1 and #2 spot in Google are duplicate content on the same site. Even the same links. Now the first link listed is of priority to Google. Yet they receive two listings. Now this isn’t quite a double indented listings though.

Ranking #1 Link
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/newspaper-publishers-media-companies-form-joint-venture-to-run-local-shopping-search-engine/2011/11/17/gIQAIVqSVN_story.html

Ranking #2 Second Link
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/newspaper-publishers-media-companies-form-joint-venture-to-run-local-shopping-search-engine/2011/11/17/gIQAIVqSVN_story.html

Now if you do a search for this in Google, you’re clearly going to get different results. The searches that came up were press releases. It was timely, fresh content, however of course this will drop off as new stuff is published and Google indexes it. Here’s some analysis for you.

So does a duplicate content Google penalty actually exist?

First you should watch this video on YouTube about the duplicate content Google penalty:

I’m Going To Bust A Myth Google Doesn’t Have A Duplicate Content Penalty!

Several of these people weigh in their blog posts with their thoughts on the whole duplicate content Google penalty debate. All of these blog posts were published within the last several days (November 2011).

Google Penalty? – Webmaster Forum

Rarely, and I mean rarely does google give a penalty for duplicate content. The associated press supplies articles for maybe tens of thousands of websites, such as yahoo news, cnn, time, foxnews,,,,. The articles are exactly …

Dealing with Google’s Duplicate Content Penalties without Doubling …

The tips and tools he provides in this post will keep you busy repurposing your content for a long, long time! As for me, thanks to Vito, I’m back in business! Dealing with Google’s Duplicate Content Penalties without Doubling your Workload …

Arguments Against the Myth of Google’s Duplicate Content Penalty …

If for the sake of argument, we say that Google penalizes the sites with duplicate content, then the question to ask is that, why does Google index the pages? No matter your content is duplicate, Google still indexes it, which …

Google Duplicate Content Penalties | Derek Gehl (this guy is an internet marketing icon!!)

Google is cracking down on duplicate content and penalizing websites at an increasing rate but most website owners do not know what to do about it!

Google’s Duplicate Content Myths and Truths

The existence of duplicate content penalties is a myth. To reiterate, what Google actually penalizes are sites that spam using duplicate content, not sites that use duplicate content for a perfectly reasonable goal…