The words “duplicate content penalty” strike fear in the hearts of marketers. People with no SEO experience use this phrase all the time. Most have never read Google’s guidelines on duplicate content . They just somehow assume that if something appears twice online, asteroids and locusts must be close behind. This article is long overdue. Let’s bust some duplicate content myths. Note: This article is about content and publishing, not technical SEO issues such as URL structure. #1: Non-Original Content on Your Site Will Hurt Your Rankings across Your Domain I have never seen any evidence that non-original content hurts a site’s ranking, except for one truly extreme case. Here’s what happened: The day a new website went live, a very lazy PR firm copied the home page text and pasted it into a press release. They put it out on the wire services, immediately creating hundreds of versions of the home page content all over the web. Alarms went off at Google and the domain w
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