Google’s face is normally Matt Cutts but now another guy is being let out to speak… Greg Grothaus.

And what a video to start with…the myth of duplicate content!

Greg starts with saying that Google DOESN’T penalize sites for having duplicate content but it can have a negative impact on your rankings.

Is that not being penalized?

He goes on to say that website owners THINK they are being penalized because their content is being omitted from Google’s results.

We’ve all seen the message:

“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 20 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”

Greg says the content may be being omitted just for that query.

“What’s actually happening, is that we’re looking at the query that the user’s doing, and we’re saying that we want diversity in the results we’re going to show a user,” says Grothaus.

He says those who think their content is being omitted because it is duplicate, will likely find that if they adjust their query to more specifically reflect the missing piece, they may just find that it shows up in results after all.

There are some duplicate content subjects and resolutions Greg covers in the video…you can see it here: