Duplicate content is a lie, spinning is bad

I read a lot of posts by people who go around saying that Tier 1 links need unique content or they wont get indexed because of duplicate content penalties. This makes no sense because all over the web people steal or cite someone as a source of information all the time. I myself have tested this with my own website (guest blogged then syndicated article with attribution link) and within a couple of hours it was indexed. I encourage you guys to write one high quality article and then repost it to dozens of high quality web 2.0 sites. I bet they will get indexed better than the spun content.

Think about it. Why would Google penalize your website if someone else took your content and posted it to their own site? If anything that shows your blog is popular enough to get its content stolen in the first place. Duplicate content applies to the same content on ONE website not across many. Of course, spamming one article thousands of times is not natural but I think with across 50-100 Web 2.0s is fine.

Tl;dr: Duplicate content is same content across one site. Links will still get indexed since content syndication happens across the net all the time. Try stuff before drawing conclusions and believing people (even this post.) Make sure you credit yourself as the author, don't leave a footprint by syndicating only yourself across your web 2.0 sites.

Don't be stupid and syndicate the same article, from the same author, linking to the same site, across the same 50-100 websites.

Other comments/urls

• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/syndicated-content-duplicate-content/28833/
• Repost.us offers FREE content for you to syndicate(advertiser actually want syndication for links).
• Search for a popular article and Google that snippet of text and see if there are more than 1 URL indexed.
• If duplicate content existed then why do press release sites get indexed when all they do is syndicate content?

Because 90% of seo's regurgitate old myths that they've read without ever bothering to test it out for themselves.

I've never mentioned it on a public forum before but my most stable sites are the ones that implement a syndication strategy for first tier. Hint: quality content naturally gets syndicated.

Now lets see how many people will actually take action. My guess is not many

I have done a few tests with duplicate content and it ranks great no different than fresh unique content, the more you test stuff for yourself the more you realise most of the stuff you read is absolute crap..

but what about duplicate and spun content on your money site?

Ztak07 said:

Duplicate content applies to the same content on ONE website not across many. Of course, spamming one article thousands of times is not natural but I think with across 50-100 Web 2.0s is fine.

Click to expand...

I agree that the penalties that we have long associated with duplicate content probably are not nearly as swift or severe as 'they' would like us to think. Web-based news services splice and serve up the same content literally on a daily basis (press releases, anyone?) and they're coming along just fine, wouldn't you say? I suppose the only clear drawback to the method you're suggesting is that the content you're syndicating might not provide much value to the reader - in my opinion not everything that budding SEOers write up is syndication-worthy. Although that's not different to the SPAM/spun rubbish that gets put out into the online realm. You're right to point out that running duplicate content on separate properties/sites probably isn't a game-ending, penalty-ensuring tactic, though. Syndication is certainly one of the more shrewd tactics you can employ to lighten the 'content creation' load.

Duplicate content problems are only really an issue if you have the stuff on your own site. Your website should have original content, but that's about it.

As far as backlinks are concerned, syndicated content works well. In fact I just did a study on it you can find here where I rank sites with duplicate content.