If you have been reading SEO news lately, you have probably heard webmasters complaining about getting penalized for duplicate content. Search engines do frown upon duplicate content. The reason is, it is a short-cut to add content to your site, and it adds no value for the searcher. But how serious is the penalty for having duplicate content?

No one can say for sure. Some experts claim that you won’t be penalized but you won’t also get any benefit out of these duplicate pages. Some others believe that you may end up in the supplementary index if your content is deemed to be duplicate. I personally believe that the nature of your content determines where you will end up.

I have seen folks getting their sites ranked high on Google by using articles from e-zinearticles. The key here is to use articles that are not reused by other members. These benefits will be short-term if others also join you in putting those articles online. But the most serious offense is done by content scrapers. If you run a scraper bot on top sites to create a site of your own, you risk getting kicked out of the search engines. I personally have been a victim of content scrapers stealing my content. But none of these sites actually have shown up the SERPs.

Duplicate content on blogs is another issue that SEO professionals have to deal with these days. The truth is, it’s better to change the robots.txt file to make sure only one content URL is crawled by engines. But I wouldn’t worry about this issue very much as search engines have gotten smarter, and they do not penalize for having two different URL structures for the same content (but you should take care of it regardless in case they change their mind!).

The best practice here is to write original content. If you have access to PLR articles, you may want to significantly change them to make them unique to search engines. Duplicate content can limit your presence on search engines if used the wrong way, so you should make sure you add plenty of fresh content to your site to negate the effect of any of your duplicate articles.