Many people have spent a great deal of time speculating about and pondering over Google’s duplicate content filter.  In fact, this is one of the biggest, blackest holes whenever it comes to SEO discussion today.  Besides trying to figure out how this dupe content filter works, many people are also wondering why the other major search engines do not use a similar tactic.  Does this mean that Google has it all wrong?

The first thing that is important to understand is what duplicate content actually is.  Basically whenever only a few web sites have the content on them, Google has a tendency of overlooking this.  However, once a lot of web sites all have the same content on them, it no longer matters who was the originator of the content as the dupe content filter will eliminate any content that it does not believe is original.  Unfortunately, this is not always an accurate process though.  What makes this even worse is that if it is your content that has been plagiarized, there really is not anything that you can do about it.

So, as you can clearly see, tripping up Google’s duplicate content filter is a sure way to kill your rankings.  For how long will this happen though?  Some domains require seven months to recover.  However, there are also some domains that never actually recover.

Now that you can see how dire the consequences can be, you may be wondering how you can avoid this altogether.  Unfortunately, there really is no way in which to avoid this.  You should know though that Google does work very closely with CopyScape.com.  Whenever this tool finds a string of between eight and ten words being repeated across multiple domains it gets triggered.  Since this would be very difficult to conduct in real time, more than likely the results that the tool is using comes from the sand boxing that Google does every couple of months.

While there is no doubt that plagiarism is a difficult problem to effectively tackle whenever there are billions of indexed pages, there has to be a better system than this.  One great solution would be for Google to spend their billions in revenue upon hiring human editors to check on this duplicate content before negatively affecting a web site.  Unfortunately, this is not something that Google has decided to do yet.  So, until then web site owners have no real control over this issue.