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The duplicate content penalty has been around for several months, perhaps even a full year, but SEOs still aren’t fully aware of how dangerous and malicious this tactic can be.

The penalty starts when Google or another search engine finds an exact duplication of a certain amount of web content on two URLs. In order to avoid both ranking well and diluting the diversity of results the search engine provides, one of the pages/sites is penalized, pushing it down in the rankings. Usually, the site with fewer in-bound links, smaller pagerank, more recently added to the index, etc. is the one that suffers the penalty.

Wily spammers have been taking advantage of this by duplicating hundreds of thousands of pages of web content on old, large, established domains, pushing thousands of smaller sites out of the rankings and taking their place by stealing their content. This practice is commonly called content-theft. It is unique from page-hijacking which uses a re-direct process to take over a page’s URL.

Naturally there is a defense and response that can be taken, but it is plagued with inaccuracy, very time-consuming and not always resolved to the satisfaction of the site owner.

You can resolve the issue by contacting Google and requesting that they remove the offending pages. The first step is to file a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) complaint with Google through their DMCA page. If you follow the instructions carefully, you should be able to get a response from Google indicating they will look into it. Resolution for my complaint took approximately 6 weeks.

Duplicate content is a nasty penalty and one that can severely hurt your rankings. If you suspect your content is being stolen, take immediate action - just make sure you do it properly.