Comment on Duplicate Content Penalty SEO by SEO Dave.

Duplicate Content Penalty Using the same theme is not duplicate content, the theme is structural (the HTML and CSS you don’t see on the page), for example I own around 130 domains and almost all of them run on WordPress using the Stallion Responsive SEO Theme, so the HTML and CSS is pretty much identical.

Many of my sites are in the SEO niche and as long as they have unique content Google will treat them as unique.

To simplify Google is likely to use a percentage measure of uniqueness, for the sake of argument let’s say if the entire page is 75% unique Google considers the PAGE unique. Google won’t care about the HTML and CSS that forms the site layout and look when it measures uniqueness, Google won’t look at a website and see a blue colored theme and consider it duplicate because other sites in the same niche use the same blue colored theme.

It’s the actual content where uniqueness matters, I don’t know what the % is and it won’t be this simple, but it make it easier to understand. If you look through almost any WordPress site they will tend to have duplicate sidebar widgets like categories, recent posts, etc… sitewide. So many webpages carry by default some duplicate content, the links to categories are the same, the links to recent posts are the same and Google won’t penalize for this type of duplicate content.

The rest of the content on a site will be unique, the main body content, the comments etc…

If you own two sites about search engine optimization like I do (own half a dozen) Google won’t consider them duplicate as long as all the articles are unique. The issue is when you copy content over two or more sites, that’s duplicate content.

That being said you can get away with a little duplicate content, for example doing something like this is OK:

Stallion Responsive SEO Theme : Stallion Responsive is not just a WordPress Theme that’s SEO friendly, it’s an entire package of built-in plugins and features that takes WordPress to the next level in Post Panda SEO and Google Performance Metrics with advanced SEO measures to help take full advantage of the new Google Hummingbird algorithm: Google algo that understands human natural language patterns better than ever before, basically long tail keyword SERPs with a human touch.

I’ve copied a snippet of text (duplicate content) from another site of mine. Overall it’s a small fraction of the content on this webspage and Google will not penalize this site or webpage for a small snippet of duplicate content.

On the other hand if I copied the entire article or a significant amount of the content it might result in a duplicate content penalty.

David Law