How damaging is duplicate content?

I've managed to put together a good library of content. I have been approached about syndicating it on other sites. This means that the same article on my site can possibly be seen on 4 other sites.
How much will this hurt my site as far as search results and page rank?
I could definitely use the added traffic and backlinks that will come from this but not if it will kill my site.

 

Your site will be seen as the initial user of the content...

All subsequent websites will look like copy cats.

The winner (original owner) takes it all - copy cats rank lower.

That's why I stopped using datafeeds. My sites rankings fell. After removing the datafeeds, the rankings improved..

 

I don't believe in this duplicate content penalty crap at all (except maybe for DMOZ or Amazon clones).... I mean, nearly everything is in some way duplicate content.
Take for example lyrics. There are thousands of sites out there displaying the same lyrics and I don't think any of them are penalized for it.
This wouldn't work anyway since it's impossible for most things (even for Google) to determine the original publisher of the content.

The worst thing that could happen is that those sites your content is on will rank above you for this article (because they are more popular, not because you've been penalized!), but if you feel the links/traffic is worth it, go for it!

 

Syndicate it with your link in every article and you should see a nice boost in both PR and traffic

 

I have seen sites get dropped from both Google and Yahoo for having duplicate content. MSN still need to work on that. If you own multiple sites that have the same content, in time, all but one will drop from Google and they all could get dropped from Yahoo.

 

I think it requires more than mere "duplicate content" to be penalized. There is plenty of duplicate content on the web that I don't imagine would be penalized, such as government documents (the Constitution, Declaration, etc), stories released by the Associated Press that appear in many newspaper websites, etc.

 

I just mentioned this in another post, but here goes again. If duplicate content causes sites to get penalized, then why is it that everytime I submit an article to EzineArticles.com, their site is what shows up at the top of the SERPs for my submitted article.

 

It's elementary my dear Watson....

EzineArticles.com is a premier article resource. EzinArticles is even older than Google ! Anyway, Google, Yahoo and friends crawl sites like ezinearticles very often. Since EzineArticles is older and is crawled more frequently they are much more likely to be seen as the original owner/user of the content.

Everyone else is seen as a follower and copycat.

I've seen it happen with a number of my sites.

I am sure Google calculates the ratio of duplicate content to - original content. I've had sites fall from #1 to infinity after using 100% out of the box unoriginal content. Plus, sites with unoriginal content are most likely to be placed in a temporary sandbox.

For me, it's tested and proven.

 

If you don't beleive it... try posting 300 widely used articles on one of your MONEY MAKING website.

Watch your ranking fall after 4 - 5 week. Then remove the unoriginal content.

 

I'm officially a Digitalpoint Berserker !

 

Organizing content in a new way can be a great benefit to users. The biggest problem is when this is abused, and people are creating close to meaningless pages.

 

I'm sure that Google is aware of popular article submission sites like EzineArticles as NOT the source of the original article. The entire site is based on allowing webmasters to post duplicate content and is a hub for other webmasters to take that duplicate content and feature it on their own site.

If Google was so against duplicate content, then sites like EzineArticles and GoArticles would be at the top of their "most despised and detested website list". However, this does not appear to be the case. They continually reward these sites for displaying duplicate content by allowing them to be at the top of the SERPs.

Google could always delist them from the SERPs, regardless of the amount of traffic that they generate.

My point is that I do not believe Google is against duplicate content as much as other webmasters think they are. If Google penalized websites for using duplicate content, then sites like EzineArticles would be out of business, because no webmasters would want to use their copyright free articles out of fear of being penalized.

Furthermore, this would cause nobody to submit new articles to article submission websites, because no other websites would bother to use them to generate backlinks for the original writer.

 

I posted an example of how duplicate content is sometimes not affected in this thread but here is what I said:

Maybe someone from this thread can shine some light on it.

 

If someone was to report the duplicate content, Google might remove regardless of how old the site is.

 

Your proably right about this... but what about your site, that uses that Ezinearticles.com content.

Our sites are not immune to the "distributor liscence" from Google or Yahoo.

Depending on SE(s) alone for traffic is not a "safe" way to make a living.

 

The site that uses the EzineArticles content isn't doing so great. I don't seem to be getting any traffic from the 10 articles I submitted.

However, I have one site that I started a month ago that now has a page rank of 4. It is 100% duplicate content articles.

 

Duplicate content sites can still get PR. The question is how does the duplicate content site rank?

 

Pretty good. EzineArticles is a site that is 100% duplicate content and it gets ranked 1st all the time.

 

The PR doen't help much if you are not ranking in the top 20 of the SERPs.

Here is a good article. http://www.site-reference.com/Marketing/12382/index.html