We’ve been asked the question about how Google treats duplicate content and penalties for it. We have no 100% answer as we believe we can make cases for the myth and cases for the fact, so here’s how we see it.

If you are posting an article that has been posted on another site, on another server and with a different name for the page, it is unlikely that you will receive a duplicate content penalty for the page, if this wiss the case millions of news pages and feeds from around the world would all be penalised, but as we all know they still get listed and ranked by Google and the major engines.

However, we do believe there are cases where if you are hosted on the same IP address, with exactly the same page name, and if any parameters are the same that you will be placed in Googles supplemental index. At this point all we know about the supplemental index is that Google only considers these results if there are no results in their main index. Another thing we have noticed is that once you are in the supplemental index, the cache isn’t updated very often, if at all and that it is therefore very hard to get a page out of it. Duplicate content on the same site ends up the same way.

There would apeear to be other reasons that you may end up supplemental but we will discuss those at a future date.

Rob Parker is a real estate internet marketing expert with Leaf Tech Web Inc. who specialise in real estate search engine marketing and real estate web sites.