Hi guys, I have asked a brief question in another thread in this sub-forum, but rather than being annoying and hi-jacking that thread, I wanted to make a little more of an elaborate discussion/thread here. I have a website, targetting local businesses. It is not much, and it is not hard to rank very high on google, and that being said - I won't get many visitors either. However, I do want to put an 'autoblog' on there, or even, a 'manual' blog if I could simply copy-paste good articles from a different source online. The person in the thread told me duplicated content is fine and that the 'penalty' for duplicated content is a 'myth'. I am, at this point, not agreeing or disagreeing, but before going ahead and posting some nice articles on my site from external sources, what are your thoughts guys? I would save me a whole lot of time... and money, if i could just source some good / relevant articles online, and paste them into my blog. Thanks for all the help!
zengetsu, it can't really differentiate between duplicate content on different sites but if you have 8 pages with the same thing on it, you'll more likely just get them delisted. If you copy from other sites it may not rank as high but the duplicate content penalty isn't what it sounds like.
Seriously, half the web is duplicate content. I've got a site right now ranking #1 for multiple keywords that is nothing more than an autoblog disguised as a news site. It provides excerpts and posts a link to the read the full article. It's getting around 30,000 uniques a month, plus a ton of returns. Google doesn't care about duplicate content. They care about you providing value to the visitor (think time on site and bounce rate). If your site provides no value, regardless of the content, it will be forever lost in the serps.
im in kinda the same situation, i have around 25 pages of unique content, but i need more content which would go into my "blog" sub folder, would it be ok if the content is not unique? and will adding such copied content make any difference( +ve or -ve) to my site's unique content page rankings? thanks
Lol have to agree that google can't properly differentiate between duplicate content. It's like the other great myth that google can tell if links are related or not...I mean please....the google bot would explode trying to figure out that a link from a football site to a olympics site is relevant....(imho btw so as not to upset the fanboys )
The only duplicate content google will penalize is on your site. You cannot have the same article posted dozens of times on your site. Doesn't matter if it's posted on another website. Just don't have the same content on your own site.
Isn't that the truth I can just imagine the googlebot hitting a site and exploding because it gets stuck trying to figure out the relevance of links between two (or more) sites. ...Does not compute... ...Does not compute... ...Does no.... BOOM! Seriously though, I never worry about duplicate content anymore. I was one of the people who believed that original content meant something. After a couple of years writing relevant, unique content for a site, I was getting consistently outranked for my keywords by autoblogs that were scraping my content. That's when I sat down and really thought about the futility of it all. Almost threw in the towel then, but decided to take a look at doing something different. I started creating smaller focused sites based on no more than one or two keywords, and scraping the content from other sites, and it's worked pretty good so far. I've yet to see a duplicate content penalty. Nor do I expect to. (the fanboys are wrong...imho)
Thanks for all that guys. So basically, i'm free to use other content as long as I don't have duplicate content on my own site, ie - 2+ of the same article in different pages on my own site!
