Let’s face it, duplicate content on the web is inevitable.

Blog and website owners worry about the wrath of Google for reproduced content, and there had been much talk about the Google Duplicate Content Penalty.

Well, here’s the good news: there’s no such thing.

Josh Garcia, in his post entitled “The Mystery of Google Duplicate Content Penalty” confirms this, and so does Google itself, in the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Josh delivers a straightforward answer to our worries about this issue, and always has awesome, insightful posts for his readers.

So there you have it folks, if your site has some reproduced content, don’t worry too for fear of being punished with the Google Duplicate Content Penalty. What is this anyway? It simply refers to the penalty that Google could possibly give you after identifying a second or a number of pages that are basically the same in your site. Others have even speculated that this can result to banning your blog or website from Google for a period of time or forever!

But Google has cleared the air by saying that “there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.” It’s a different thing when you plagiarize, of course. We all know that’s done deliberately, and duplicate content on a site is not necessarily ground for drastic action unless it appears that the intent of that content is deceptive and meant to manipulate search engine results.

What about the republishing of online articles, you may ask. Well, reprinting or republishing someone’s article on your site is not going to cause a Google Duplicate Content Penalty because again, there’s not such thing. As long as you give credit to the source and if the reprints are helpful to your site visitors and your overall mission, then it’s not a problem at all. If your own original articles are getting published elsewhere, that’s a great thing, of course! The more sites that your articles appear in, the more chances you have to build your credibility as well gain links back to your site. So you see, there’s really nothing to worry about.

We all want to be flooded with traffic, to have plenty of comments to read, to be retweeted, bookmarked, and fanned on Facebook. The competition may be fierce out there, since everyone wants your attention, but any successful blogger will tell you that nothing beats sincere, engaging, original content. No pulling of tricks to fool search engines, no copying of someone else’s work verbatim.

With creative, interesting content, even if there IS such thing as the Google Duplicate Content Penalty, you have nothing to be afraid of.