Forms of Shadows

Many people are reluctant to purchase and use private label content because they fear their site will receive the dreaded “duplicate content penalty” from Google and other search engines that will dry up their traffic. Fear of duplicate content penalties is frequent. It is also generally misplaced. There is no reason for the users of private label rights content to fear penalization via the duplicate content penalty.

In order to understand why the penalty is largely a myth, we need to examine exactly what a duplicate content penalty really does. It does not merely give “black marks” to sites that contain information similar to that offered by other sites—its real purpose is far more specific. The duplicate content penalty affixes to those sites that use the same content over and over again across the same site and to those that truly duplicate the pages of other sites in whole.
In other words, the duplicate content penalty is not handed out to those who happen to be using the same or similar articles. Its use is reserved for those who are intentionally trying to mislead search engines by repetition of the same materials over and over again on the same site. It is also used as a means to attack the site scrapers who will steal pages in full from other sites.

You can check any number of sites yourself that are featuring content that also appears elsewhere. Those sites remain indexed and listed by Google and other major search engines. For instance, consider the popular article repositories themselves. All they do is house information that appears elsewhere, yet they can easily be found via Google searches and retain high page ranking.

Despite facts to the contrary, there are those who refuse to accept the logical proposition that no duplicate content penalty could adhere due to the simple repetition of an article. These people, who may not believe that the penalty is steep, will still argue that when search engine spiders find largely duplicated content they will not index that particular page.

Even if that outlook on the duplicate content filter and penalty turned out to be correct, there would still be no reason for the owners of private rights articles to be concerned. Simple edits, the addition of an introduction or conclusion, the rewriting of a few key paragraphs or any number of other easy –to-enact techniques will allow a private rights owner to avoid any potential duplicate content impact.

In order to run afoul of the duplicate content penalties imposed by major search engines, one must be a truly egregious offender. If you practice building site after site that serve as mirror images of pre-existing sites, you will find yourself facing penalties. If you are misusing a single article by placing it in multiple locations across a single site in hopes of making the site seem content-rich and valuable, you may also encounter a penalty. You should not, however, encounter any penalty for using articles found on other sites.
Consider what would actually occur if the duplicate content penalty attached itself to incidents of republishing a preexisting article. Almost every major North American newspaper, for instance, makes use of stories provided by the Associated Press, Reuters or other similar news services. A single AP article may appear on literally thousands of newspaper sites. If using that article caused a duplicate content penalty to occur, ever newspaper site in existence would find itself crushed by a spiteful Google.

Of course, this doesn’t happen because the search engine is not preoccupied with the fact an article or other content may appear in multiple locations. One could argue, in fact, that the sharing of information and its resultant appearances on a variety of sites is one of the Internets most commonly occurring phenomena. If duplicate content penalties were designed to combat these perfectly legitimate uses of existing content, it would be a wholly misguided effort. Fortunately, that is not what happens.

If concerns about duplicate content filters and penalties have prevented you from investing in private label rights articles, it is time to rethink your position. You will not find yourself de-listed or otherwise penalized for use of private label rights articles. Additionally, if you do still believe your pages might not be indexed due to redundant content, you need only perform slight edits and revisions to the private label rights articles to avoid any possible problems. The idea of a duplicate content penalty should not prevent anyone from pursuing powerful and versatile private label rights articles.