Duplicate Content - No Problem At All!!!

Hello friends,

Today i came across a bizarre happening. One of my content writers posted the exactly same content copied from the inner page of the other site. That page has PR4. But Google didn't do anything. My page for the same content achieved PR3 and is ranking 1 on google.com for my targeted term.

How the hell is it possible? Has Google stopped doing anything for duplicate content? As far as i know if it has crawled the content once, it will not re-crawl it, if the same content is found else where.

 

There are many legitimate reasons for having duplicate content on the web. Google deals with duplicate content using filters it's not a penalty. If you are the original source, you will more then likely have more links to the article, so in theory you should rank above the duplicates.

 

i agree with you and appreciate your answer but the problem here is a bit different. i am not the original source. i have checked for different keywords and the original source is ranking above me but how can i get PR3 when i am having duplicate content. moreover, for one keyphrase i am raking 1 on google.com

 

Pagerank is a calculation which is based on your link profile. It has nothing to do with content.

 

okay got it. but i have only 4 external backlinks and rest are internal. but i don't understand how two sites with exactly same content are running well and ranking?

 

the keyword u used is base on ur blog/site content and domain .... geo or keyword domain make different

 

Content and PR... What's the Connection:
For the 150,000,000th time... PR has absolutely nothing to do with the content of your page. PR is just a measure of how many inbound links a URL has and how strong those links are. Period... NOTHING to do with content...

Your page could be completely blank (or 100% duplicated content) and if enough sites link to it you can have PR8. Or your page could have the absolute BEST content in all of the world, but if no one links to it will have PR0 or more likely be flagged as not currently ranked.

Read The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (paying special attention to section 2) and Wikipedia's explanation of Page Rank. Then go read Google's patent on Page Rank. Once you understand the formulas it will be quite clear that Google is NOT looking at your content (or those of sites who link to you) as part of calculating your page rank.

All they care about is a page's PR is worth X... the page has Y followed outbound links... So each of those outbound links gets passed approximately X/Y PR (I say approximately because it takes into account a damping factor so that PR decays as it's passed from page to page to page). They do this calculation for every page that links (as a followed link) to your URL to determine how much PR or 'juice' is being passed into your URL by each inbound. They sum up the amounts of PR from each of the inbounds (both internal and external) and bam! That's basically your current 'real' PR.

Then once every 3 or 4 months they map your real PR number using a logrithmic scale to your tool bar PR and publish that as an update. By the time the update is published your toolbar PR is already several weeks out of date.

PR is way overrated. It is only 1 of the 200+ ranking factors considered by Google's algorithm when ranking your URL for a particular keyword phrase. I tells you nothing about how your page is going to rank in the SERPs.

If you want to rank well, concentrate on getting links from relevant pages with link text containing keywords or keyword phrases you want the URL to rank for regardless of the PR of the page that links to you. Don't worry about the PR of those pages.


Duplicate Content and the Ranking Algorithm:
Where duplicate content figures into the ranking algorithm is that there are numerous other ranking factors considered by the ranking algorithm that are based on the content of the page. Maybe there are 5 of these content-based ranking factors... maybe there are 25 of them... who knows. Keyword density might be one of these.

By having your content flagged as duplicate, all of the ranking factors that are based on the content of the page, like possibly keyword density, get devalued likely by some percentage which is scaled based on the extent to which the content is duplicate... maybe not all the way to zero but it will be worth substantially less than if it were unique, original content.

It could be that if 100% of the content in the non-templated portion of you page is duplicate content then they might devalue all content-based ranking factors by 100% all the way to zero. So if the density of the keyword within the content would normally have scored X if it were the original, it might be worth 0.00*X or zero because it is all duplicate.

Perhaps if your content is a 50% duplicate of the original then they might devalue all content-based ranking factors by 50%. So if the density of the keyword within the content would normally have scored X if it were the original, it might be worth 0.50*X or half what it would normally be worth if original because it is half duplicated.

Again who knows... and who cares about the exact scaling of the devaluing of content. All you need to understand is that having duplicate content on the page makes the content of the page worth less than it would be if it were original which it turn simply makes it harder for duplicate content to rank well... Not impossible, just harder. There are many other factors in the ranking algorithm that can make up for the lack of unique content such as getting more backlinks with better link text than the originator.

Duplicate content can actually outrank original... it just requires better scores on other ranking factors than the original and for the overall ranking score of the URL w/ duplicate content to exceed that of the URL with the original content when the sum of all 200+ ranking factors are taken into consideration.