Recently a Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts has shared a video about the duplicate content. In his video, he said that the around 20-30% of the web content is repetitive and duplicate.
This would be the big relief for those who have duplicate content over web but obviously this will have to be with limitations. Further Matt Cutts added that, you don’t have to worry about it because duplicate content won’t hurt you, unless it is spammy and Google doesn’t treat duplicate content as spam.
Here is the video
How Google Treats the Duplicate Contents
Google groups all the duplicate content together and will show only the best and most relevant results for search queries and duplicate content will get the rankings they deserves.
Google has full rights to penalize a website that duplicating or manipulating content excessively over internet. But overall, the duplicate content won’t hurt you and it is not a spam. There are limitations and parameters for this.
To understand more about the duplicate contents, here the complete explanation from Moz.
If you are duplicating content, the better chance to get penalized by Google, thus following are the few best practices to avoid the duplicate content
Following are the ways to avoid the Duplicate Content Penalties
Blog
One of the best ways to feed your website with fresh and unique content is incorporating blog section into your website. Blog enables you come up with new and latest information every time which help attracts the thousands eye balls wondering for useful information on web. However, with this said make sure that the content which you are going to feed to your website, neither duplicate or nor has been posted somewhere else and which invokes readers to share it. This would be your real achievement if your content gets shared over internet.
301 Redirects
If you have moved your website to different location, don’t just copy and paste the content over new location. You need to assign a permanent redirect which is also called ‘’301 Redirect. This is how you can save yourself from Google duplicate content penalty. 301 Redirect will automatically redirect your visitor to new location which is valid.
Share interviews, user reviews
The best way to keep engaged visitors is to include the interviews, opinion, personal reviews and user reviews on your website. These types of content will not only help you gain traffic but also gets treated to be unique and add value to your website. Google gives high preferences to the websites that are designed for users instead of search engines.
Assign Rel=”canonical”
Another option to deal with duplicate content is to make use of rel=canonical tag.
Here is the Complete Guide to Rel Canonical