Duplicate Content Question.

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Perry Bernard: DUPLICATE CONTENT QUESTION:
  Our dear friend Mr MC of Google has stated in recent times that duplicate content across two websites targeting different countries is not really an issue "because spammers are not really likely to go to that much trouble". However, what do people here think? Does that mean hosted in a different country, targeting a different country set in GWT or both? Or neither? Opinions, thoughts and finding in evidence very welcome :-)
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  Edwin Jonk: I think he was talking about country code Top Level Domains which are automatically targeted at a specific region.
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  Tony McCreath: I've always thought about it this way.
  
  Googles duplicate filter stops two pages with the same content showing up in the same search result.
  
  If you have the content duplicated with each copy ranking in a different region, then they don't trigger the filter and you have no problem.
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  Perry Bernard: +Tony McCreath ;thanks Tony. So what you are saying is that the precise background mechanisms are relevant only in that they should prevent the two pages from rendering in the self same search, on the self same engine, and at the self same location? So country targeting settings GWT would try to ensure that was the case - but not entirely, since my NZ targeted website is in fact rendering in GoogleUK SERPs for example. There's plenty of evidence in GWT that locally targeted sites (GWT targeting was set) that those sites still render in non-targeted locations. So on that basis, GWT targeting settings doesn't satisfy your suggestion of non-competition for the same search in the same engine at the same time. This would imply that the mechanism to allow duplicate content is something else. Country TLD? If so, what about .com vs .co.uk (generic vs country)  ;or .com vs .net (generic vs generic)?
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  Edwin Jonk: +Perry Bernard ;any geo-targeted domain even if it is a ccTLD can rank in the non-geo-targeted search engines. However it is sub-optimal. Meaning that you might rank but you probably would not get any conversions. In other words, you rank because there isn't anything better....
  
  Assuming the dot com and the dot co dot uk are the same (even the currency and more). Google would pick the one that it thinks is most preferred, but (again) that is sub-optimal. Better would be to serve only one version. ;
  
  To me, it is not about a penalty it is about optimizing for a certain region.
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  Perry Bernard: +Edwin Jonk ;Thanks. What I am trying to draw out here is: What is the core defining feature that will make duplicate content acceptable to Google? MC of Google likes using words like "probably" and "maybe". His language is highly keyed at making sure Google didn't really say much at all they they could be held accountable for (if you were big enough and wanted to try). This means to me that what MC says about how Google operates should often be taken with a pinch of salt, or examined closely for its semantics to ensure we are not reading too much into a comment. I am about to start an experiment to test some theories, but wanted to see if there is some existing evidence people can present.
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  Tony McCreath: I think Google is fine with duplicate content. But it's sub optimal.
  
  If you have multiple URLs with he same content then bots have to crawl them all, they compete with each other, links and social signals are split. These factors mean that in general a single copy will do better than having multiple copies.
  
  For international ranking it can be slightly different as each copy is targeting a different region. When I researched this a few years ago regional ranking factors included ccTLD, GWT setting, content related to the region and regionalised backlinks. ;
  
  But is it worth splitting up equity to have regional pages. The only gain I see is to have that ccTLD that locals like. Is it worth the cost?
  
  It's a different story if you change the content for each region. e.g. change language or dialect. Then you are giving the locals a better experience. In this case hreflang can help Google send people to the right version.
  
  And it's another story if duplication is because you stole the content. Then you may get punished.
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  Perry Bernard: +Tony McCreath ;interesting point about stolen content. How can this get signalled to Google unless the content originator found it and complained and this was somehow fed back to the algo or had manual action taken?
  
  I am about to "play" with my own currently ranking content and duplicate it into another domain, to see what happens :-)
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  Tony McCreath: +Perry Bernard ;I think Google tries to determine the correct owner of content. But this may mainly be to give preference to it when filtering out duplicates.
  
  Panda also seems to take originality into account so could take it to the next step of punishing websites that tend to copy.
  
  Original owners can file a DMCA request to Google: ;https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en
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  Perry Bernard: +Tony McCreath ;yeah, have seen the result of DMCAs in SERPs. I suppose Google will default to "first crawled" version as being original do you think? Or do you reckon consideration extends to the rest of the site too?
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  Tony McCreath: +Perry Bernard ;First crawled would be a good clue. One citing the other would be another.
  
  Strength and reputation of the site could also be an influence. I think +Dan Petrovic ;did an experiment to steal content and ranking at one point.
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  Dan Petrovic: alternate hreflang and your job is done