If you know how to avoid duplicate content on your website, you should be able to avoid the dreaded ‘Google duplicate content penalty’. In fact this is not a penalty so much as a filter, that removes what is considered to be duplicate content, and retains listed that version that Google believes to be the most relevant, or that originated the content or the version that has the highest Page Rank.
These are all surmise since, irrespective of everything you read online about it, nobody really knows how Google filters duplicate content and arrives at the version(s) to remain listed. How and why it happens is really irrelevant to you in any case, since your main concern is how to avoid it.
Duplicate content is normally defined as either large blocks of text or complete web pages that are duplicates of each other. In order to avoid this happening on your website, there are actions that can be taken to reduce the possibility. It can rarely be avoided completely.
A copyright notice on each of your web pages might help, but is unlikely to deter anyone determined to copy your content. There is nothing you can do about that, other than to run software looking for other versions of your content elsewhere on the web. Perhaps you have two versions of a page on your website: a normal version and a printer version. If you don’t want Google to remove one from the listings at the expense of the version you would rather keep, then disallow one version to be spidered by use of your robots.txt file.
Perhaps you have a number of different domains pointing to the same content. In this case you should RedirectPermanent in your .htaccess file in the main directory of your domain to redirect Googlebot and the other spiders. This is what is called a “301 redirect”.
Perhaps you have other sites linking to yours using both the ‘www.’ and ‘non-www.’ version of your URL. If this is the case you should use Google’s ‘webmaster tools’ to inform them what way your site should be indexed. Then one will be automatically changed to the other preferred form.
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