Question on duplicate content

Hello blackhatworld,

Soo, my interest is in review websites and when looking at my competition I've run across websites that ONLY, and I mean, ONLY, have duplicate content. They have made a form with several blanks where they can put in an anchored keyword to their product. The content is about 1200 words long, but they keep using the same exact form over and over. To be more specific they have used the same 1200 words in about 100+ different articles, only switching the few spots for the keyword.

My question is as follows: I thought Google hated duplicate content, why are they ranking so well. They rank at about 1-6 for a majority of their targeted keywords.

The website has been around for a year or so

Google doesn't particularly penalize duplicate content if the copied content is from your own site. What they want to stop is people taking content from OTHER sources. If Google penalized sites for duplicating content across their own site, many product pages, amazon listings, t-shirt sites, etc... would be penalized.

That being said. It is DEFINITELY better to not duplicate content across a site. There are WAYY more factors than just content. Domain age, links, url structure, number of images, social shares. They probably have an authoritative root domain.

(It should also be noted that Google doesn't penalize the FIRST site that publishes content. If they were the first place this page of content was published, scrapers can steal and spin the content... and they wont get penalized because they were first. I'm not sure if this pertains to this example... but it is good to know)

that probably explains it. It just seems weird to me that , even with backlinks and structure you can have an authoritative domain built on duplicate content. You keep hearing about how in order to start becoming authoritative you need over 100 articles on your site. Well, these pages have over 100 articles, but they all say the same thing! I'm going to try this, and see how it goes. Currently my website is full of original content, but it has dropped in serp. I'm going to try doing a whole bunch of same page duplicate content and building authority that way.

I'll make a thread about it with results in the future. Thanks for your reply PartyNeon.