In her latest video, Google’s Aurora Morales talked about duplicate content, not just from an organic search perspective, but also from publishers looking to monetize their sites. It started with the need for your website to offer value that is worth more than what you can find elsewhere.
Google can restrict or disable your Google AdSense ads on your page if your content is duplicate or of little value. Google’s AdSense guidelines prohibit the placement of AdSense ads on “sites with scratched or copyrighted content”. Examples include:
- Websites that copy and republish content from other websites without adding any original content or values
- Websites that copy content from other websites, make slight changes (e.g. by replacing synonyms or using automated techniques) and republishing
- Websites for embedding content such as videos, images or other media from other websites with no significant added value for the user
She said make sure your content isn’t copied or duplicated from other websites or even internally from your own website. If you have a lot of similar pages you should either expand the similar pages or combine them into a single page.
Then she explained on the Organica page that sometimes, and perhaps often, duplicate content is not intended to deceive the website owner. Specifically, how URLs sometimes need to be canonicalized. She said this technical duplicate “is fine.” However, she stated that doing so can cause crawling and indexing issues in some cases. She also explained that this problem can occur with printer-friendly pages or category pages with snippets. All of this is fine, but it can result in Google not knowing which page to show in search. Google recommends using Canonicalization to tell Google which page to search for.
It explains how to report websites copying your content, including DMCA requirements.
Here is the video:
Here is John Mueller’s video that she referred to above:
Forum discussion on Twitter.
