Duplicate content has been a concern for a while now. Google has gone on the record reassuring everyone that there is not a duplicate content penalty*. That being said, there is a filtering process that happens. The search engines are trying to provide the best user experience so duplicate content is omitted from the results. The key here is what do you want returned in search?
What Do You Want Users To See?
Google has implemented some new features in the past year to help website owners deliver the content they want users to see. No one wants the print page to rank higher than the original.
There are a couple of basic ideas that need to be addressed when dealing with duplicate content. The first is multiple domains. The search engines work in credibility. The crawlers and user activity give a website credibility. All the work we do to drive traffic and service our customers lends to this credibility just as is brick and mortar business. We dilute that credibility with multiple sites. The crawlers don’t see that www.example.com and example.com are the same website, and so crawlers give credibility to each site individually. In order to maximize your efforts, everything should point to a single domain. There are occasions when it is best to sacrifice a little of that credibility across multiple domains. If you cater to multiple countries and languages, you must decide if usable content for your target is more important.
The second idea is content within the website. There has long been the option to block crawlers from content within the website through tags and robot files and Google has just released this year's tags that act as a redirect. These are a work around to help more sites with the duplicate content issue. The overall message is you know best what you want to show the world, so help the search engines deliver it.
*Edit: At publishing time, there was no duplicate content penalty for search engines. However, now there is a duplicate content penalty, and using duplicate content can result in a loss in ranking on search engines.
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