Duplicate Content misconception and misunderstanding

Hello, I am looking for people who have tested and understand the duplicate content and the penalties that go along with that.

On BHW, there are various threads that debate the subject from past and present with seasoned SEO's taking both sides.

My question is what about news sites that post the same exact article? Do they not get a penalty as long as they give the original article a backlink? If you do get a penalty is it only for that page, or is it your whole domain that gets penalized?

http://searchengineland.com/googles...tent-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/duplicate-content-problems/

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en (Google?s Matt Cutts: Duplicate Content Won?t Hurt You, Unless It Is Spammy)

http://www.thesempost.com/duplicate-content-penalty-exception/ (Duplicate Content Will Not Trigger a Penalty? With One Exception)

Technically dupe content will index and there won't be any penalties for it.. only if your site isn't spammy as hell which means large part of your articles are copied (maybe that's why autoblogs are not working as good as they used to). I have done pretty ridiculous copy and paste and even used source's link (technically its called content curation) and I have outranked the source article..

I think even Mr Cutts said that there's no such thing as dupe content penalty because the whole web is very high % dupe.
Also there's a nice article on ahrefs: https://blog.ahrefs.com/duplicate-content-myth/

What people don't understand is that they CAN use dupe content, but having a site 100% scraped stuff does not work as efficiently as before.
But then again everybody must test it by themselves.

If anyone argues with that then I'd be happy to see their proof and being a noob is not valid proof (if you are unable to get your article indexed/ranked).

Please keep in mind that I'm not suggesting that autoblog days are back.. I'm just saying that using dupe content is okay to specific limit (no idea what kind of limit, I just made this 1 test).

Testing is the key!

Thanks for the response. Yeah I coppied a very short article, changed a few words to make it sound better and gave them a link. Its a small news article about something specific were not much can be changed.. I think It will be ok from what I ready but I think I am going to have to do this a few more times.

anyone else have a say?

how about copying a pdf file that has no HTML version. could you outrank that pdf? because i read somewhere that Google always prefer the html version over the pdf version . anyone can clarify?

how about copying a pdf file that has no HTML version. could you outrank that pdf? because i read somewhere that Google always prefer the html version over the pdf version . anyone can clarify?
Edit: here's the article https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021584.html

News sites get away with a lot of stuff - duplicated content happens to be one of them (if it's large enough, of course).

Out of curiosity, I did a similar experiment to see the effect of duplicate content in SEO.

I used a blogger account masked with a custom domain and copied-pasted around 10 1000+ words articles from same niche popular sites. I even used the same image URLs as that were posted in the original pages. I wrote a 1000 words seperate article which was optimized for a low competitive PPD keyword. That page ranked at #1 within a week or so BUT mind that the ranked article was original and keyword optimized whereas all other articles were random copied niche relevant articles. But it was around 1 year ago but that page still ranks in Google for that keyword and many related longtails. I'm sure this method still works but not sure if it will be able to rank for high competitive keywords but what I want to say is Duplicate issue is not as severe as we think.

I have dup content on the same .info domain (the so called doorway pages) it is 23% unique and i still rank with them and they still give me leads everyday

My conclusion is that the dup content penalty is none existence

fc-dh said:

I have dup content on the same .info domain (the so called doorway pages) it is 23% unique and i still rank with them and they still give me leads everyday

My conclusion is that the dup content penalty is none existence

Click to expand...

it feels like a penalty but it's actually a filter