Duplicate Content Penalty

Hi all,

I have one development site and one live site. Both have the same content.

What is google's stance on Duplicate Content?

From what I read, there isn't any penalty, BUT in my case, I could end up having my development site being crawled by google and appearing in the results page. That is the last thing I want.

In this case, how can I circumvent the issue? Do I create a robots.txt file and do a User-agent: * Disallow: / ?

Thank you.

 

Yes, placing a robots.txt file in the root directory of your development site is the correct thing to do.

User-agent: * Disallow: / will indeed prevent Google from indexing the development site.

Simple!

 

Having the same content on both site is just like missing another opportunity to provide hub of information to the audience and for the search engine side your development site and the live site will miss the chance to show in the search results but providing the most trusted websites instead of your site.

 

Sorry but I don't quite understand what you mean.

 

Duplicate content is a huge topic in the search engine optimization (SEO) space; heck, we even have a category devoted to the topic. But should we worry about it? Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said he wouldn’t stress about it — that is, unless it is spammy duplicate content.

In a video posted today, Matt Cutts answers, “How does required duplicate content (terms and conditions, etc.) affect search?”

Matt Cutts said twice that you should not stress about it, in the worse non-spammy case, Google may just ignore the duplicate content. Matt said in the video, “I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing.”

Google has said time and time again, duplicate content issues are rarely a penalty. It is more about Google knowing which page they should rank and which page they should not. Google doesn’t want to show the same content to searchers for the same query; they do like to diversify the results to their searchers.

 

Hi Richard,

Thanks for sharing this knowledge.

Yes, I have come across this as well. The SEO firm that managed my client's website said that it will hurt the SEO rankings, which I clearly know now is nonsense. It makes me very doubtful of their abilities.

You hit the nail on its head for me. As you mentioned, it is about Google knowing which page they should rank and which page they should not. I learnt that if my development site is indexed, then it might appear on the google search results, which is a definite no-no for me.

 

there is no restriction about copy paste and duplicate contents. as new goolge police
http://viralsled.com

 

When it comes to republishing your own content in another website which you own won't be an issue at all. It's just that you need to make sure put a small note at the end of the content that it has been republished from the original website. You can see even websites like Entrepreneur.com, Inc.com usually republish some high quality articles from other blogs with the permission from the blog owners. If Entrepreneur.com asks permission to re-publish your article you're definitely going to tell a "YES".

Hope it helps.

 

One of the easiest ways to determine if your duplicate content is going to hurt your site is by asking yourself why you want to duplicate the content. If your reasons have more to do with you, such as you want more eyes on the content, you want to get the content to display higher in search, or you want to manipulate search results then you shouldn't do it.

 

Yes duplicate content doesn't come with any penalty by google but do assure about two things:
1) The website you want to promote put your content there first
2) When you post the same content on your second website do mention the permission there

All the best!

 

Sorry if don't easily sink in. What i mean is if both sites has the same content Google will consider it as low quality sites and it will not penalize but it will miss the search results due to other competitor websites that are better than your sites.