If you’ve read up on search engine optimization and article marketing, you’ve almost certainly come across some discussion about the Google “duplicate content penalty”. The official statement from the side of Google on this matter is very clear: There is no duplicate content penalty. Despite this, the rumor about dupe-content penalties is alive and well. This post should hopefully shed some much needed light on the subject.

 
“Incomplete” Search Listings?
There is something that often happens in Google search results, that perhaps could be misinterpreted as some sort of penalty. When you type in a search query, you’ll often get a small link below a result that you can click to see more results. Those extra listings are always either from the same domain or from diverse domains, but with identical content. Google does omit listing certain pages from the normal search results. Google usually lists no more than two results per domain and no more than two results that are on different domains, but have identical content. In every case, however, you can click on a small link to tell Google you would like to see all of the available results. Of course, this omission of listings is in no way a penalty.

Let’s assume you’ve written an article and now you submit it to several (maybe even hundreds of) article directories. Now, you do a search for a specific phrase in that article. The results will typically list your article on one or two directories, followed by the option to show more of the results that are hidden, because they are identical.

At first glance, this may look like some kind of a penalty, but of course it isn’t. While pages are missing from the results, all those pages are still indexed and only a click away from being displayed. The pages are also all flowing pagerank etc.

The reason for the omitted results is simple: Listing tons of identical pages or lots of pages from one and the same domain would make the results less useful to the users. And Google aims to please the users.

Article spinning
So, what about article spinning? If there’s no dupe-content penalty, can we throw away all of those spinner programs? Not at all. Although the ads for such programs often get it wrong as well: They usually go the “fear sells” route and try to make you believe that you will get punished by Google for syndicating your content across the web in an unspun fashion.In reality, article spinning does have a purpose and it can be very useful – it’s just not about avoiding some non-existant penalty. The point of article spinning is to get lots of different content published and this content can catch more long-tail traffic for you. If you write an article, apply some spinning to it and then submit it to a few dozen or even several hundred directories, you’ll have lots and lots of randomized sequences of words floating about online. Just by pure chance, someone will, from time to time, do a search for a string of words present in one of your article-variations, find said article and maybe follow the links within. That’s long tail traffic for you. If you do a lot of article spinning and submit to many directories and blogs, you’ll eventually get lots and lots of long-tail traffic like this.