Duplicate Content: is it a myth?

[PeterRota]

Hi everyone, just wanted to clarify some things, i've heard about a million different things on this; I just wanted to ask if duplicate content is a myth or its not thanks.

Peter

[MattAntonino]

Our tested answer is that it's both.  And therein lies the problem and the different answers you'll get.

Matt Cutts has repeatedly said "don't put your entire blog post on your homepage but if you have a teaser and link to the actual location that's a good way to do it."  (http://www.webpronews.com/google-duplicate-content-2011-12)

He says Google understands blog structure but that you should only show excerpts other than the main page.

The issue is that it conflicts with a lot of things we've seen & heard including older stuff he's said.

"typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site"

The problem is say on Wordpress you tag a post with 15 tags.  If you don't no-index a lot of your "ways" of seeing it, you don't have 1-3 versions. You can have 15 tags+ the permalnk + archive pages + category pages + ... and it just adds up.  You shouldn't worry about 1-2 versions on your site.  You should worry about 15-30 versions.

Out of curiosity, I ran a test on 2 generic wordpress.com blogs.  I tagged one with 15 tags, tagged the other with 2 tags.  Same subdomain length and topic.  I indexed 3 posts with long random strings.  In all 3 cases the one with 2 tags beat the one with 15 tags.

Then I no-indexed the 15 tag posts and they passed the 2 tag posts within 2 weeks.  So in my experience, fewer duplicated posts meant more juice.  However, no-indexing just the tags improved my SEO.

Small scale test but one I'd love to see repeated on a much larger scale sometime.  In my opinion, duplicate content hurts unless it's excerpts (news sites, blog front pages).

Hope that helps (and explains why people give you both answers.)

[PeterRota]

Thanks for the answer Matt I appreciate it

[gfreeman23]

How long did it take for the tags to drop from Google's index?

I have a site with about 800 tags indexed. Even after I did no-index follow, they're still showing up after a month. Do I have to wait it out... or could it not be picking up the noindex?

[MattAntonino]

It took me about 2-3 weeks each time.  I have a large list of Wordpress ping services and I manually pinged everything I could so it's possible it could take longer. Make sure you have a sitemap in WMT and it should speed you along as well.  If you just made the change, I'd suggest resubmitting a map so they recrawl fresh.