Unless and Until It Is Spammy Content, Duplicate Content Won't Hurt You say's Google's Matt Cutts

Duplicate content is a huge topic in the search engine optimization (SEO) space; heck, we even have a category devoted to the topic. But should we worry about it? Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said he wouldn’t stress about it — that is, unless it is spammy duplicate content.

In a video posted today, Matt Cutts answers, “How does required duplicate content (terms and conditions, etc.) affect search?”

Matt Cutts said twice that you should not stress about it, in the worse non-spammy case, Google may just ignore the duplicate content. Matt said in the video, “I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing.”

Google has said time and time again, duplicate content issues are rarely a penalty. It is more about Google knowing which page they should rank and which page they should not. Google doesn’t want to show the same content to searchers for the same query; they do like to diversify the results to their searchers.

Google’s Matt Cutts: Linking 20 Domains Together Likely A “Cross Linking Scheme”

A common question I see from webmasters and SEOs is how many sites in my network can I link together without getting in trouble.

Google’s head of search spam Matt Cutts answered a question on that topic in a recent video which asked “If I have 20 domains, should I link them all together?”

In short, Matt Cutts said that it is very unlikely that a webmaster would have 20 websites on a similar topic and for those sites not to be somewhat spammy. “First off, why do you have 20 domain names,” Matt joked. Matt added, “if it is all, you know, cheap-online-casinos or medical-malpractice-in-ohio or that sort of stuff… having 20 domains there can look pretty spammy.”

When would it not be spammy to do so? When you have 20 domain names but they are all localized versions of your site and you are linking to them, then that would be okay. But even in this case, Matt said you shouldn’t link to all these domain names in the footer — instead have flags or a drop down to access them.

Matt Cutts then talks about blog networks doing it, but advices against it.

At the very end of the video, Matt says it would be a “cross linking scheme” to link all of these sites together, unless there was a “very good reason” to do so.

Here is the video:

Google Webmaster Tools Warnings to Include Example URLs

Good news for webmasters who have been struggling to identify links and pages that have been trigger warnings in Google Webmaster Tools. Google will now include example URLs in their emails warning webmasters about manual spam actions.

There are many cases where webmasters know they have manual web spam action taken against their site, but they can't figure out what is triggering the spam action, or they are confused and believe the wrong thing has caused the manual spam action.

In a Webmaster Help video, Google's Matt Cutts details the types of cases where people are struggling to identify problems on their site, part of how Google Webmaster Tools is trying to provide more concrete actionable information in their emails to webmasters.

"For example, we've seen a couple sites that had millions of pages that had manual web spam action taken on just a very small number of pages, or in one case, just one page. But they got a message saying 'Hey you need to look out because some of your content have been defaced', and they didn't know exactly where to look."

Don't think Google will hold your hand and include every single thing that is wrong with your website, but getting a couple very specific URLs to show what is wrong with your site, which you can then use to help identify other pages with the same issue, definitely helps take some of the guess work out of the cleanup equation.

"Now we won't be able to show every single thing that we think is wrong for a couple reasons," Cutts said. "Number one, it might help the spammers. Number two, if there are a lot of bad pages, we could be sending out emails that are 50 MB long. But we do think that it's helpful if we can include a small number of example URLs that will help you as a webmasters know whenever you try to fix things and clean the site back up.

"It's much better than I was a few months ago and we'll really looking for ways to provide even more guidance and a little more transparency so webmasters get a better idea where to look," Cutts said. "It's going to take some time to rollout and test and ramp up and there might be a few cases where people might not be able to get an example but for the most part we are going to try to provide more and more information over time so that legitimate webmasters can know where they need to look to try to fix problems."