A couple months ago, Google clarified how its search engine handles duplicate content, but I still keep running across people and blogs getting all twisted in knots as to whether or not Google will penalize them because all the URLs on their site can be reached both with and without a trailing slash.
As Google made clear back in September,
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.
So unless you’re intentionally trying to deceive Google with dupliate content sites, the worst that is going to happen with duplicate content is Google might decide URL X is the canonical URL for some content on your website, when you really might prefer it use URL Y.
So enough with all dire warnings and silly plugins designed to prevent the horrors of Google finding duplicate content.
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