Is duplicate content bad?

I plan to launch a website soon to let people submit web articles. I'm sure some will submit content that are duplicates from other websites.

Will google blacklist my site for having duplicate content?

 

I went from #1 in my niche to the 3rd page because of duplicate content. I can find no other explanation.

 

In my opinion, I think "duplicate web site" is the worst.
becuse copy and paste is usually on internet but duplicate site will get punishment by search engine.

 

i have an article directory with 30,000 + non unique articles and it does very well with regards to being indexed and SERP's

Don't worry about duplicate content, just make sure you check that the articles in your directory don't link to bad neighbourhoods.

 

I don't believe Google will black list your website decause of duplicate content though pages with duplicate content might not get good results in SERPs. Duplicate content for an articles directory is not the same as a cloned website.

 

My thinking is, duplicate content and design both are bad.

 

no, that is fine.

duplicate content is where you have the same article or content on many different pages on the some website/domain, or you build two different websites that are identical just on different domains.

 

Duplicate content is bad.

 

Duplicate content should be avoided as much as possible.

 

If duplicate content hurts your site, then your competitors can simply sabotage you by creating tons of similar content sites as yours..

Google will not penalize duplicated sites. They simply chooses the best page on the search result page. Read more from Google Guidelines at:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359

 

Finally someone with a little sense, duplicate content is not bad, i have several article directories with the same articles, all site have been well indexed, i also have 3 art sites all with the same content on, different templates but essentially the same content and nothing has happened to stop the site getting indexed, ranked or visitors.

don't worry about duplicate content and get on with developing your sites

 

Duplicate content on 2 different websites is not very bad. Think of all those lyrics websites for example. A song lyrics is the same, of course there is duplicate content.

 

You won't get blacklisted for duplicate content.

 

Oh good guess i won't need to worry when i make my website =D

 

The problem starts when you have ONLY duplicate content. Also if you link to original content, I don't think Google will penalize you.

But again duplicate content may not help you in SERPs.

I wonder how google determines who is copying whom! Is it through PR or through content age?

 

I read some where on google (directly from google) that if there is duplicate content, google bot will choose the best one to display

 

Yes that's true, and they determine best by most authority. It's got nothing to do with age, or who had the document first.

I proved this to someone a few weeks ago, they had an 8 month old PR3 article that was 100% original. I copied it (with his permission) on to one of my authorative domains, linked it from the homepage and beat him in SERP's about 72 hours later.

A search for "piece of the article" came back, Results 1 of 2 with my URL being displayed and the "Repeat the search with ommited results included" needing to be clicked to view his.

So, duplicated content is just far less likely to bring you natural visitors from SERP's. Multiply this by 1,000s of pages and it starts to become a problem, however there is no "penalty" involved for the site or the page.

 

Hmmm well duplicate content has always been a big no no in my book.

 

KC TAN - great answer. Thanks!

 

Create some original content and add a well. Perhaps add a review or comments.