Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty"

[SunPoker.com]

Interesting post today over at the Google Webmaster Blog about duplicate content:

Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you're scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines:

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.

....consider the effect that duplication can have on your site's bandwidth. Duplicated content can lead to inefficient crawling: when Googlebot discovers ten URLs on your site, it has to crawl each of those URLs before it knows whether they contain the same content (and thus before we can group them as described above). The more time and resources that Googlebot spends crawling duplicate content across multiple URLs, the less time it has to get to the rest of your content.

In summary: Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you've been duplicating deliberately, it's unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty.

You can help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties!

[PPP]

Typical FUD, they say:
"Having this type of duplicate content on your site can potentially affect your site's performance..."

and

"If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results..."

This is Google at its unhelpful best. they are saying they don't deliberately "penalize" a domain for duplicate content, but then they say it can effect your site's "performance" and they will choose a version of content to rank, while delusionally saying they are "good" at that. Good does not equal perfect.

So instead of answering webmaster's concerns by saying clearly that duplicate content can cause lower rankings, especially if they mistakenly choose the wrong URL, they emphasize they are not deliberately trying to penalize people.

To most webmasters if you get shot in the head accidentally or deliberately it isn't going to matter much...