Hi all,
Long time reader, just started posting.

So, my question is about the duplicate content penalty, I have found a way around it, but I am curious about this idea of mine.

Essentially I am ripping customer reviews off a site. I'm taking the reviews from several different pages, such as:

reviews.site.com/page1/reviews
reviews.site.com/page4/reviews

etc. etc..

I'm compiling the reviews together in random order on a single page, and I'm wondering if Google penalizes collections of various pages, or if duplicate content is done on a page by page basis?

For example, will Google see the individual chunks and surmise they were copied from 2 different pages? Or will Google notice that yes, chunk 1 matches a page, but chunk 2 comes from a different page and therefore my article must be unique?

To make things more interesting I found comments that are hidden with a <div>, you click a link to show the <div>, which shows you the rest of the comments. I noticed that these hidden comments aren't indexed in Google, so I am mixing these in with the comments already indexed, will that help at all?

BTW: if you are wondering how to get over duplicate content penalty it's easy, just Digg your article with good keywords and let Digg direct the traffic for you, viola, you still have good content for the visitor, google rankings be damned because you're leaching off Digg's reputation, not yours!

Any ideas?

I have copied a review site (forex robots) with the exact design and the exact reviews and article in the other site, i have just modified the keywords and pages titles and some other details , and im getting a descent numbers of visitors (its a 4 moth old now) and some good sales

Google has a secret algorithm for determining duplicate content. I've heard before that 13 consecutive words the same can be enough to flag a page as duplicate.

If there are 25,000 commonly used english words in online content then we are talking about the odds of two pages having the same 13 digit base 25,000 number... pretty astronomical odds even if we went 13 digit base 5000...

Ultimately no one knows for sure except Google. You can tell after the fact though.

http://www.mapelli.info/tools/supple...tio-calculator

A lot of people have theories about supplemental indexes, but I have found from experience that the ratio almost always represents how much of your content google perceives as duplicate content. I have tuned numerous sites with 20k+ pages from 98% supplemental to 0% supplemental and all I had to do was eliminate circular references in the navigation that produced different URLs with the same content AND use canonical tags to credit the original when I had to duplicate my content.

The supplemental index calculation is a good indicator of google's perception of your content as dupes. If you get a negative ratio then submit the queries again... google uses old cached values and resubmitting the queries can fix the issue when it happens.

google will treat is as dupe content but it depends on the sources of your traffic.If PPC then don't worry, organic traffic however may suffer

Thanks for the replies, I also noticed that for the reviews indexed in Google, no other site has ripped these. This would mean my site will have a close match, but not exact as I am mixing and matching reviews instead of listing them on the same page as the other site.

Does the duplicate content penalty apply for just 1 additional webpage with the same content? I heard dupe content starts to kick in when google finds more then 2 websites with the same content, this have any truth?

PS: I know google algorithms are cloaked in secrecy, but i'd like a popular opinion..

My experience suggests that there is not a dupe content filter externally per se...its more like simple website competition.

If you think about it outside of your website, there are 2 copies of the same content out there. If that is the case Google will evaluate them against the keywords they are most optimized for and rank the "better" of the two higher based on the same factors it uses to rank any and all pages. A site with the best set of ranking factors will show the highest for that content relative to the keywords its optimized for.

Now internally on your site if you post dupe content it will get filtered out. Be sure at the very least to have unique titles and descriptions to avoid this as much as possible if you cannot make the content itself unique.

Good points thanks, I am adding custom headers, titles, alt tags to images and custom links with descriptive anchors, hopefully it will help a bit.

I work I am doing it all the time, no need to worry