People are so afraid of duplicate content that they miss out on many interesting opportunities that they can take advantage of. SEO became really complicated in the past few years. Everyone is looking at duplicate content as being a guarantee that your site will be penalized. This is not actually the case.

The situations in which your site would be penalized because of duplicate content are severe. For instance, if you write a press release and it then gets copy-pasted into hundreds of sites in a couple of days, you might end up with a penalty when a manual check is done. However, in the event that you re-post one article from a reliable source or one press release on your site, the possibility of ending up with a penalty is like 1 in a billion.

Duplicate Content Is Misunderstood

When people talk about duplicate content they usually mean one thing: an article that is published on a page of a site, an article that was already published somewhere else. This is a practice that is much more common than what you may think at first glance. Really big sites do this all the time and they are not penalized.

Duplicate Content Will Not Rank

While the large sites/blogs will republish an article because of the high quality it has, there are zero expectations for that article to rank on the long run. Domain credibility is not going to be affected and in fact, it can increase authority if the article is really good.

Let us take this site as an example, even if it is small. If I were to copy paste an article that comes from Search Engine Journal and I would mention that this is the case, it will not get my site penalized in any way. However, it may give me some shares and generate some traffic that way. At the same time, this might make people like other articles and link to them from their blogs.

Think Quality!

This is the most important thing that you can do with your blog. If you frequently post unique, high-quality content, you will never have a problem with duplicate content in the event that you publish one article from time to time. However, if you keep posting duplicate content, you will end up with someone taking notice, especially if the site is small and does not often publish articles. Having a site that is mostly made out of reposted articles is a guarantee that a penalty will happen.