There are really 2 camps out there.

The first camp believes that the Search Engines “penalize” content found on a web site that is an exact duplicate of another.

The second camp believes that there is no such thing.

And who better to tell you the actual situation than the Search Engines themselves?

I went to Google’s Help Center at:

http://www.google.com.my/support

and searched for “duplicate content” and the following is the result:

http://www.google.com.my/support/bin/search.py?query=duplicate+content

Click on the few listings there talking about this issue and you’ll have a fair idea of what Google’s stand is.

In short, Google is saying that it does not index duplicate content.

This would seem to be the definitive answer, since it comes from Google itself.

However, I’ve found that Google does not really follow this rule because I have seen duplicate content being listed in their Search Results time and time again.

For example, I’ve seen the very same articles written by the same author on different web sites being listed below each other when a search for the title of the article is made.

I’ve also seen the exact Killer Sales Letter for some products with Resell Rights being listed below each other when a search for a keyword found in the Killer Sales Letter is made, even though they all contain the same exact words.

Thus as far as being “penalized” for having duplicate content is concerned, I really have not seen any evidence of it if “being penalized” means not having it indexed by Google (in this example) – because they ARE indexed.

However, if “being penalized” means not being ranked higher than it should be ranked – there’s really no way of knowing whether this is the case unless you’re Google itself.

But if you’re concerned, there’s an easy way around this.

Simply make your Private Label “unique” by adding some words, or sentences or whole paragraphs in a few places to enhance the content in some way.

You can also use synonyms in place of certain words so that they convey the same meaning without using the same words, thus ensuring that it is not “duplicate content” in the literal sense of the word. There are already software on the market for this purpose.

Both approaches will take some work and time to effect which will be wasted if Google does not care too much about duplicate content in the first place.

Interestingly, if you did a search for “duplicate content penalty” in the Google Help Center, you would see NO results (as of the date of this post).

So if I were you – under the current circumstances with the current evidence, I’ll spend more of my time marketing my web sites than worry about having duplicate content.

Hope this helps.

Sen Ze

Thanks for this very enlightening post. One thing about private labels. Subscribers are allowed to use the articles without fear of copyright issues, so that is OK. However, it is likely that more than 1 subscriber will be using the same article, so it means that there will be duplicate content on the web. And I understand search engines penalize duplicate content. What do you have to say about that?