One of the major problems webmasters face while they try to rank well in Google search results is that of duplicate content and multiple site issues. One of the most feared consequences of duplicate content is that Google penalizes the website and removes it from its search results' database.

This can lead to tremendous loss of visitor traffic and completely ruin the search engine optimization efforts of the website.

However, Greg Grothaus of the Search Quality Team at Google clarifies that Google doesn't really penalize websites for having duplicate content. Even though duplicate content has a negative effect on your website rankings, Google itself doesn't penalize you for it.

Website owners often think that their content is getting omitted from Googlees search results because Google has actually filtered their website and taken it off from their databases. However, it may just be the case that Google has left the result only for a particular query. Greg points out that duplicate content is simply a factor on a 'by-query' basis.

What happens is Google considers the query entered by the user and seeks to provide diversity in the search results. Thus, they omit the web pages that contain similar content from the search results that is shown to the user. This doesn't mean that the omitted web pages have been scrapped off the database altogether. All you need to do is adjust you query to specifically reflect something contained in the missing pages and you will find those web pages displayed in the search results.

Google understands that so called duplicate content is not usually created for deceptive purposes. Rather, they are just unintentionally created replicas of a particular page. Web pages that actually contain duplicate content for unscrupulous ranking advantages are labeled as 'spam'. In fact, spam websites are not penalized for being spam and not because they contain duplicate content.

Here are some ways your website may be containing duplicate content. There may be multiple versions of a particular page. For example, if you have a website www.website.com, here are some forms of the URLs.

www.website,com/
www.website.com/?
www.website.com/index.html
www.website.com/Home.aspx
website.com/
website.com/?
website.com/index.html
website.com/Home.aspx

All these URLs are different but lead to the same web page and deliver the same content. And Google views all these URLs as the same and select the right one. But it may or may not be the right option. Webmasters are the best people who know what is the best version of the particular page and that is why it is advisable to use only that one instead of having multiple versions. Variety only serves to confuse the Google crawlers.

Here, even though Google may not penalize you for using more than one version of the same URL, be prepared for certain issues that may have a negative impact on your website rankings in Google search results. Here are some potential problems:

Diluted Link Popularity

Instead of having all the backlinks arrive at one particular URL, they will now be pointing to multiple versions of the same URL. This will make it more difficult to collect link juice for any one URL. What was supposed to be accumulated at one point gets distributed among several points. As many versions of your URL, so diluted will be the link popularity.

Shallow Crawling

When you have multiple versions of the same page, Google crawlers will have to spend more time crawling the same content. As a result, they would have less time to move deeper into your website thus there are chances that your content would not be indexed completely.

Decreased Usability

The usability of the website also goes down because there will be multiple locations for the same web page. This serves to confuse the website visitors and hamper their user experience.

In order to prevent such issues, it is advisable that you use a canonical version of the URL. Select the simplest and most relevant form of the URL and link consistently within the website. You can also use the rel=”canonical” link element.