Penalties are something that seems to evoke something akin to open warfare in search engine optimisation circles. There are those who flatly deny that such things exist, there are those who insist they definitely do exist, and there are those (who seem more interested in semantics) who contend that it’s really filters rather than penalties and can’t seem to make their minds up either way.

Personally I have little doubt that they do exist – I’ve seen too many instances of sudden changes in ranking that could only be the result of corresponding changes in content. And no, I don’t believe in coincidence. Someone once said that

“Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and pulleys.”

and that seems a perfect description of our relationship with search engines.

So who among the search engines has penalties? Recently I’ve been dealing with a site that seems to have been suffering from a duplicate content penalty in Google. Having found some more duplicate content on the site and removed it I was interested to notice that there was an immediate improvement in Yahoo rankings for the terms related to that page. This tends to confirm a feeling I’d had for a while that Yahoo had introduced either a filter or a penalty for duplicate content. Nothing as severe as Google, who seem to dislike it a lot and have long memories, but a perceptible difference in ranking.

So far I haven’t seen any evidence of MSN having any duplicate content penalties. However they do seem to be developing their algorithms all the time so don’t rule it out for the future.

On a more general point I never cease to be amazed that anyone uses someone else’s content – is it just laziness? To me, if I’m trying to sell a product or a service to people, I want to use my own words, my own angle on things, to sell that product. If I know anything at all about what I’m selling and who my market is it seems clear to me that I’m the one who can best articulate that. Why would I want to rely on someone else’s view?

Write your own copy, or if you don’t have the writing skills then talk to someone who does, tell them what you want to say and get them to write it for you. …. and make sure their work is completely original.