One of PinoyBlogero.com’s readers asked, “Won’t blogs get penalized by Google when they cross-post on other blogs?”

A lot of Pinoy bloggers are doing “cross-posting” nowadays. Once they finish up an article, they’ll cross-post a copy of it on blog aggregators (like PinoyBlogosphere.com or PinoyBlog.com), on their other blogs, or on their multiply account.

Cross-Posting is done to increase the chances of an article getting more exposure. It’s like putting your product on different stores to increase its exposure and, of course, sales.

It is a good method of getting traffic, however, cross-posting actually produces duplicated content. You know, one of the things that Google doesn’t like.

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.

I’ve researched on how Google deals with duplicated content and this is what I’ve uncovered found on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Basically, when Google sees duplicated content, it only shows one out of the series of cross-posts when serving search results. For example, if you cross-posted your article on a bunch of other blogs, Google would only display one blog out of them when someone searches for your article.

How does Google determine which to choose? Well, that’s up to Google’s complex algorithm.

In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments … so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that’ll befall webmasters is to see the "less desired" version of a page shown in our index.

So , the answer to your question is, Google would only penalize cross posting if they see that you have the intent to “manipulate rankings and deceive users.” Although they might be referring to scrapers site, cross posting on blogs that have a high PageRank can actually influence your own, Google might think that you’re manipulating your rankings.

So even if you don’t have any intention to manipulate rankings and deceive, there might be a possibility that the Google bots might mistake yours as an unwanted content, risking your blog’s standings on SERPs and your pagerank.

One solution to avoid being penalized is to cross-post only a small snippet or summary of your post and link it to the original post instead of cross-posting the whole article.

In the end, it all depends on whether you value SERPs and your blog’s PageRank. If not, then go ahead and cross-post all you want!

For more information about the topic, then you could go and visit this page. I hope I have answered your question! Happy Blogging!

Do you have questions about blogging or the Pinoy blogosphere? Don’t hesitate to send your questions by contacting me here. I’ll try my best to answer them by posting them here on PinoyBlogero.com.