Will my site be penalized for 'duplicate content'?

[Beverly]

When referring to duplicate content, you might only think of sites which scrape or republish content from other sites. But, often there are on site situations where pages duplicate and this can happen on product or shopping sites.

For these type of situations, where there is no intentional misconduct by the webmaster and no intention to deceive Google, there is no 'penalty' or manual action taken to remove that page from search results.

However, Google does indicate that if left to it's own devices, they are likely to choose the best version of the page to represent the site in search results.

Here is an excerpt of an article presented by Google explaining 'duplicate content'.

But most site owners whom I hear worrying about duplicate content aren't talking about scraping or domain farms; they're talking about things like having multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content. Like www.example.com/skates.asp?color=black&brand=riedell and www.example.com/skates.asp?brand=riedell&color=black. Having this type of duplicate content on your site can potentially affect your site's performance, but it doesn't cause penalties. From our article on duplicate content:

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

quote excerpted from an article on Google Webmaster Central Blog

 

[jesse pitt]

very helpful article thanks a lot sharing and letting us know the real matter.

 

[ravi raj]

They choose those pages which have been linked more like if their are two pages with same content they will choose those which has got more links to it.

 

[RH-Calvin]

We have always noticed that duplicate content has been an issue and Google has always penalized blogs using duplicate contents. Content plays an important rule in ranking websites in Google searches.

But as you said that e-commerce websites can have duplicate content or rather duplicate webpages with the same product. Google identify them as products and not contents and thus they get an exception in penalties.