Over
5 years ago I had a really nice set of Amazon affiliate stores that
used Amazon’s XML datafeed, prior to Google cracking down on thin
affiliates for duplicate content: basically content created using the
affiliates content with no added value, AKA duplicate content or thin
affiliate content, my very easy to make millions of indexed Amazon
affiliate product pages (created from duplicate content) went from
pulling in 25,000+ unique visitors a day to a fraction of this traffic
(probably about 500 visitors when I wrote this, little from Google,
today 2014 probably no traffic).
Went from making around $50,000 a
year just from those Amazon affiliate stores to a hell of a lot less:
made just $117 from Amazon last month (2010), $75 the month before
taking into account AdSense income from the stores pages I’m probably
making less than $1,500 a year from those pages (2014 update next to
nothing now).
Google’s Response to Article Duplicate Content
The
same is true of duplicated articles (article content is no different to
product content to Google), so if all you do is copy articles from
article directories like every second webmaster trying to make easy
money online you are highly unlikely to do well in Google long term.
You
can get away with some duplicate content, but use too much on a
page/site and it will not rank well in Google no matter what you do.
That’s not to say duplicate content can’t pull any Google traffic, you
might still get some real easy SERPs, but in comparison to what you
would get if the content was unique it’s a trickle of traffic. Like I
said 25K compared to 500 visitors a day and that’s from about a million
indexed pages (Google will still index your duplicated content, but
don’t expect a lot of free traffic)!
Google SEO Duplicate Content
My
advice is avoid using a significant amount of duplicated content on any
page you consider important. I hate to give precise percentages since
every page is different, with a small page you can get away with more
duplicate content relatively speaking than a large page: if there’s 500
words and 200 are duplicate that’s not that much duplicate content, in
comparison if there’s 3,000 words and 1,000 are duplicate (less of a
percentage than the first example) that’s a LOT of duplicate content for
a page that size. Like wise 200 duplicated words out of 3,000 words
isn’t a lot, that could be considered a quote of another page or
something which isn’t going to trip any duplicate content filters in
Google.
In general I’ve found you can add duplicate content to a
site and it not negatively affect your unique content, but if for
example you are adding 10 duplicated articles to every 1 unique article,
you are pretty much wasting the vast majority of your SEO benefit (from
links) on pages that are going to be penalized, basically using
duplicate content is a waste of resources.
Duplicate Content and Google SEO 2014
2014
SEO Update: it’s different now, Google does appear to downgrade a site
(the entire domain) for having duplicate content, so more duplicate
content you have less well your unique content will tend to rank. I see
it as a domain trust issue, if all your content is unique Google has no
reason to doubt the quality of the content on the site, if a significant
amount of content is duplicate it raises questions about the rest of
the content. I think of it like a credit score, if you’ve had some bad
debts your considered more likely to default on a loan, so your credit
score is lowered (your domain is less trusted for having duplicate
content).
I don’t know how Google determines how to rank the
unique content, might even be the domain isn’t penalized per se, but
link benefit (PR) flowing through duplicated content has a dampening
factor, similar to how Google disregards the PR/link benefit of some
links when they believe they are paid for or acquired to game Google
rankings. If the PR is dampened (and I’m not saying it is, just saying
it could work this way) more duplicate content Google finds more link
benefit that’s wasted.
Duplicate Content SEO Test
I had a
site I wasn’t really using, home page PR3. Was a waste to have a site
with PR and no content, so I added an automated tool for adding articles
from an article directory. So used duplicate article content only.
Over
1,000 articles had been published with many covering niches that are
relatively high traffic. Now at PR3 home page I didn’t expect thousands
of visitors a day, but if all this content were unique I could expect to
see at least 500 visitors a day and probably 1,000.
Actual
traffic is more like 10 visitors a day. Update 2014: The domain
eventually lost it’s PR3 and never ranked for anything useful, I let the
domain expire a while back.
Avoid using duplicate content, I’ve
tried all sorts of ways to get past the automated duplicate content
penalties, but within a week or two of adding the duplicate content it’s
clearly been downgraded in Google SERPs.
If you take anything
away from the above SEO discussion it’s NEVER, EVER, EVER add large
amounts of duplicate content to important domains.
