Everyone is aware that duplicated content has absolutely no value whatsoever, and that Google is highly likely to discredit any site that it finds it on. But are there any circumstances when duplicate content is acceptable, and why does Google take such a strong stance within its algorithm against duplicated content.

Firstly if you suspect that you have duplicate content on your site go to http://www.copyscape.com. This will tell you if, and where exactly the text has been replicated. Unfortunately it’s not wise or time efficient to approach each and every site that has the same copy as you, so I would recommend adjusting yours to be completely fresh and original.

The reason for duplications being so worthless is common sense really, Google is trying to promote a rich source of information with its search results, and therefore if 10 sites appear on the first page with identical information, it is neither informative or thought provoking and will therefore normally use the site with the highest PageRank (Wikipedia in most cases).

Other examples of duplicate content can be caused by canonicalisation. This is where a webpage is mirrored in two or three places, often unrecognised by webmasters it is something that is essential within the SEO arena. An example of this is when you have three different URLs representing one page http://www.mysite.com, http://mysite.com and http://www.mysite.com/index.html. This can be fixed by a .htaccess file on an apache server or in the IIS Control Panel on an IIS server.

The only time Google actually allows duplicate content is for very specific long tail search queries, to be relevant there is naturally going to be some duplication for these kind of instances and the intelligent algorithms have managed to see these and permit accordingly.

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