Google’s Tips On Duplicate Content Worries

Over the past year, I’ve heard more and more worries about duplicate content
issues. It’s a serious concern site owners have, though sometimes I fear the
worry is out-of-proportion to the reality of people actually getting hit by
duplicate content penalties. Others may disagree. If you are worried,

Deftly dealing with duplicate content from the Official Google Webmaster
Central Blog provides some excellent tips and advice on how to avoid issues with
Google. I especially like the last tip:

Don’t worry be happy: Don’t fret
too much about sites that scrape (misappropriate and republish) your content.
Though annoying, it’s highly unlikely that such sites can negatively impact your site’s presence in Google. If
you do spot a case that’s particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a
DMCA request to
claim ownership of the content and have us deal with the rogue site.

Postscript: Then again, you can understand the worry when you do a
search like
site:searchengineland.com and find Google lists only 5 of 146 pages it
knows about, with the comment:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some
entries very similar to the 5 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat
the search with the omitted results included.

It’s just lame, nearly 140 different pages seemingly considered the same.

FYI, this is probably down to us getting the same meta description tag
accidentally on every page:

Search Engine Land is a hub for news and information about search engine
marketing, optimization and how search engines work for searchers.

That happened as part of the redesign process, and I’ve now fixed it. But
it’s still lame that all those different pages get considered virtually
identical for purposes of a site: report based on one sentence.