But isn’t my site going to be penalized if I have blog posts from a content channel that are the same as another subscriber?

What about the Duplicate Content Penalty by Google?

I get this question pretty often from prospective clients as well as other social media marketing and blogging professionals when they hear about our service and how we write high-quality, industry-relevant, credibility-building blog posts for our clients and publish them automatically to their WordPress-based blogs without them having to do a thing.

They’re usually always impressed with the solution that we offer but have that nagging question in the back of their mind because they’re quite sure that they’ve heard it somewhere before by an internet marketing expert.

I’d like to put the Google Duplicate Content Penalty question rest by pointing you to a couple pieces by the authorities, including Google themselves.

Here is a link directly from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog that addresses the question of a duplicate content penalty.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

Customers bring this up in regard to our content channel because of this myth that has been pushed around for a long time by a lot of “experts”, most of which are pushing SEO services.

As the article clearly states, “Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.””

While I agree that having unique, fresh, relevant and keyword rich content is a best case scenario for any and all of our clients, the fact remains that they likely won’t sit down and write that type of content 3-5 times per week, and definitely don’t want to pay the $40-50/post that high quality posts like that would cost to have written and published for them.

Our service provides a foundation of content, which is fully editable, and stands in the gap for our customers who want great quality, consistent information posted on their blog and syndicated through their social media sphere of influence.

Plus, at a rate of just a few bucks per blog post, there is no way they could get this type of content automatically posted for them at such a low investment per month.

By the way, here’s another response that I wrote to this question when asked by one of our reps.

It contains another good link to a detailed and accurate description of the fake Google duplicate content penalty promoted by some.  The author, Jill Whalen, is a well respected authority and pioneer in Search Engine Optimization.

“The duplicate content thing is so misunderstood by people who call themselves “experts”.  He’s dead wrong.

http://www.highrankings.com/no-dupe-content

All I can say on that is that if she reads that article and then still agrees with her web guy, not much will change her (or his) mind.”

Once again, the Google Duplicate Content Penalty is misrepresented by well-intentioned folks at best.

At worst, this is a lie that has been perpetuated by greedy internet marketers who want to line their pockets by injecting fear into the unsuspecting business owner or sales professional who is just trying to get themselves and their business promoted through the awesome power of social media.

And here’s a video from Google Master Matt Cutts himself on the topic of Duplicate Content: