Google may penalize your site for duplicate content

I'm going to deviate from the Get Your Business Listed Series this week to share a powerful tool that is freely available to all. The site is CopyScape and it is a tool that searches for copies of your website content or information on the Web. According to Copyscape's About page, it states:

Copyscape is dedicated to defending your rights online, helping you fight against online plagiarism and content theft. Copyscape finds sites that have copied your content without permission, as well as those that have quoted you.

You can follow CopyScape's example to see how they locate duplicate content and present that information.

Now copying and pasting, or duplicating content from another site, such as a competitor, is a big no-no according to how search engines work and could hurt your website's ranking in search engine results like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Elixir Systems, a search engine marketing company, states the following fact regarding duplicated content:

Google penalizes page rank when it determines that content is duplicated by other sites.

Well, how do search engines do this? Since Google does not want identical listings in their search results, it compares the age of the page between sites containing the duplicated content and prioritizes the older page (or site).

Also worth reading is the article Duplicate Content Penalty - How to Lose Google Ranking Fast by Search Engine Journal.