Duplicate content sites, the whys and wherefores

Hi everyone,

Im a very happy black hatter at the moment. I have been locked in a room coding and reading articles on PHP/curl, apache and the side effects of drinking excess amounts of caffeine.

I have emerged in a daze, smelling like a camels armpit on a misty day and realized that I could actually build an empire of content sites, which are nothing short of content theft from all those hard working content article marketers.

I know that I would never dream of borrowing content from other sites but I came to realize that you could easily copy say 100k of articles in a few days or weeks. Once you have these articles in a database, you could then duplicate this duplicate content over and over again domain by domain or subdomain over subdomain.

I know there is a lot of talk about duplicate content, spinning, class C ip addresses and such.

1. So I was wondering what people think are the real concerns with duplicate content?
   
2. Is content A (unique) worth more then A A A A A A A A A A (Duplicates)?
   
3. What are the real concerns regarding content and class B/C/D addressing?
   
4. Are there any useful articles or blogs on the internet related to duplicate content insights?
   
5. What are the best tools, if any to use for duplicate content empires?

I know that its rude to even think that someone might duplicate content on the internet but I was only wondering.

Thanks for reading my post and best wishes to all you hard working Black Hatters. Remember to shower regularly and reduce your coffee intake to under 20 a day.

As a fellow coder who has been doing something similar for a while now, I'll share my observations on it.

Dup content is not a myth, but it's widely exaggerated and misunderstood. I really think if people spent half the time testing theories that they spend online blindly defending them everyone would be a lot happier.

Still, building a site with all dup content isn't easy (it's easy to do, not so easy to rank well with). You can give yourself a leg up with an aged domain that has at-least a PR of 3 or 4, but even then it can be rocky.

One way to use other's content legitimately AND make ranking your pages a lot easier is to not build a page using a whole dup content article, but rather grab the titles, summary descriptions and URL's for 7 to 10 articles related to your single keyword that you're targeting on the page, and publish those as a sort of "link list" or "keyword-topic resource" page.

Basically saying "Hey, you want info on Ginzu Pearing Knives? Here's everything you could ever want to know"... and don't forget to click my ads

This way your page isn't seen as all dup content, but rather more like a single topic based content mashup. Look at the Drudge Report, that's all it is. Digg, Reddit, Delicious... none of them hold unique content, the pages are massive content mashups themed by topic/keywords.

If you're building a system to pull articles into your own database, then you could easily turn around once your database is large enough and code a simple script that would pull multiple articles out of the DB based on a keyword search and then just display chunks of each one on the page, so when someone visited your "Internet Marketing" page, the page script would search your DB for articles related to internet marketing, randomly grab chunks from 7 to 10 of them, and display them to the visitor.

This would also have the added bonus of your pages never getting stale since each visit would result in 7 to 10 different random article chunks being shown on page. SE bots eat that sh!t up.

Real visitors like these kind of pages, they see them as resources (if you do it well), and you'll see backlinks and traffic growing all on their own for you. At-least that's been my experience. I set sites like this up all the time, and in weeks I'll have backlinks on blogs, forums, social networks like FB, twitter... it's like instant link bait if you actually deliver a bunch of decent options for visitors on the topic they care about.

As for your questions on IPs, I've never worried about it myself so I can't offer too much. I imagine if you're going to do a lot of cross linking of your sites you might want to watch this, but I don't really do any link building (or cross linking) for my sites like this so I'll throw 10 of them up on a cheap reseller account, all on the same IPs and NameServers without a care. I give each new site of mine a single article backlink (and I push the article out on the social networks) just to get the site noticed by SE's, then let it grow on its own from there on. I'll just keep adding pages to the site daily until I run out of keywords for it, but no more links or promotions. Once the SE's find it from the article link, just adding content daily and having a sitemap will keep them coming back, and if folks start sharing or linking to it on their own the snowball grows.

If it doesn't grow, you're not delivering enough to visitors yet, so add to it. Maybe start displaying a video or two on the pages, pull some news/blog/etc. stuff in that's related to your keyword. Just find what works with your visitors, give it to them and it'll pay off.

As for tools, the best idea is to build your own if you're a coder. That way, even though you're using dup content for everything, you can add touches of spice into the content and delivery to make it just unique enough to avoid sharing a footprint with a thousand other sites out there.

Hope some of that helps, forgive the ramble it's early morning and I haven't been to bed yet

Smashing response sir.

The mashup approach is a good Idea.

I had a Pay Per Click script once that used to alter its content based on the inbound link. Making a whole mash run of dynamic or static pages based on captures or views of say a google blog search kind of thing could do the same trick.

This could be an interesting project if anyone wants to join together to do some coding

Very interesting ideas. Thanks again.

oh, really good reads on both parts. thank you for the great ideas as usual