Duplicate Content Penalty Myths and Some Tests I’m Running

But it doesn’t mean your whole site gets penalized, not unless your whole entire site consists of duplicate content.

The “penalty” itself is basically the non-indexing or low-ranking of content on your sites, that’s it…

AH! This is the million-dollar question here, right?

This penalty can be incurred when you:

• post duplicate content on other sites you own that are on the same hosting, which means IP address, subnet etc… (Google Says: We select what we think is the “best” URL to represent the cluster in search results.)

• post duplicate content to the same site of yours twice. So, if you published something on site A and it got published once again at a later time on site A, that’d be a problem.

I took one blog post, and posted it to 2 of my other blogs without changing anything except the title of the posts.  The content, tags, and keywords were all left the same

1- I published the initial unique content/blog post it to Site 1
2- Then I took that original post and published it on Site 2, with a new title
3- By the time site 2 was ready for publishing;

• Site 1’s post was already indexed and positioned/ranked at the top of page two

4- After publishing to Site 2, the post got indexed a  few minutes later, but…

• Once Site 2’s content got indexed, Site 1’s content disappeared from the SERPs!

5- By the time Site 3 was ready for publishing,

• Site 1’s post had gotten indexed, then disappeared when Site 2’s content got indexed
• Site 2’s post was indexed and at the bottom of page one,

6- I posted to site 3 with same content and new title, and a few minutes later this post was indexed…

• Once Site 3 got it’s post indexed, I couldn’t find Site 1, nor Site 2’s content anywhere

5 days later…after posting these 3 duplicate posts, the last site to post the dupe content is still the only site appearing in the SERPs.

Fact:
I saw with my own 2 eyes that the primary posts (site 1 and site 2) were indexed and ranked well within minutes.
Assumption:
We can safely assume the first 2 posts were going to rank well at some point if nothing else happened to affect their SERPs

Fact:
Every time another duplicate content piece was published then indexed, the previously indexed duplicate content disappeared from the index a few minutes later.
Assumption:
The second and third pieces of duplicate content seem to pushed the previously indexed and highly-ranked content (site X, or Y) out of the index.

Fact:
All of the content was published on sites using shared hosting with same subnet class IP addresses. which to the search engines basically means “same point of origin” for this content.

Conclusion:
There is a dupe penalty if you re-purpose content without modification on your own sites, which means the same IP address/subnet shared hosting etc…

However, there’s no penalty for posting dupe content elsewhere except for lower rankings… The reason for that is explained below in an excerpt from the Official Google Webmaster blog:

For example, we sometimes hear from Amazon.com affiliates who are having a hard time ranking for content that originates solely from Amazon. Is this because Google wants to stop them from trying to sell Everyone Poops? No; it’s because how the heck are they going to outrank Amazon if they’re providing the exact same listing? Amazon has a lot of online business authority (most likely more than a typical Amazon affiliate site does), and the average Google search user probably wants the original information on Amazon, unless the affiliate site has added a significant amount of additional value.

Future Duplicate Content Testing:

• I will take this same post and have a buddy of mine post it on his server
• I will take this same post and post it to article directories
• I will later on go back and modify those posts on site 1 and site 2 to see if the penalty” is something that be be undone, what will “undo” the penalty and report back here to this space.

Do you have any better ideas on how to test out Duplicate Content Penalties, one way or another?
If so, please share them below as I am always open to new ways of testing things in order to arrive at truth.

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