What exactly are the criteria for a Search Engine to show one page on top of the other one in SERPs even when the content is 90-100% identical, while neither of the pages get penalized for duplicate content? i.e. Lyrics pages, Syndicated News on different Networks? After all, the lyrics are not different from one site to another and most often than none, the page only includes lyrics and nothing else. I know the internal, inbound, outbound links, page meta tags, URL also play a big role for the ranking, but I am more interested in the duplicate content part of the equation for such a scenario. When and how does a Search Engine decide whether it is duplicate content?
Ssandecki, My website, which is my first attempt at affiliate marketing and web design, is mostly product oriented. I have original content on their as well. I'm a little paranoid. I rewrote most of the product descriptions and used Copyscape and duplicate content checks to make sure I was OK. What percentage is considered duplicate content by the search engines? The reason I ask is, I have had my site up for almost 60 days. 26 of 41 pages are indexed, and it fluctuates. Last week, I had 31 pages indexed. I don't show up for any of my keywords. Oddly, after the site was up for 10 days, I showed up at number 9 & 12 in Google for two product related keywords. I know the organic search takes time, but could I be getting penalized for duplicate content? Most of of my product pages have a 15%-45% similarity to the merchant's pages. Again, they are nutritional products, so there is only so much I can do, in terms of rewriting content. The warning label, ingredients, etc. can't be rewritten. Should I have went this route? I could have started with another niche that is more information-based and I have written tons of unique content for this specific topic. Ephedra diet pills isn't really that competitive, surely I should being doing better. I don't even show up in the first 200-300 results for those keywords. Again, I know it takes time to rank, but I am nowhere to be found. I'll keep adding content and products, I just hope my efforts aren't in vein. I work 9-10 hours per day, I then come home and put in 2-3 hours adding content, learning about SEO, web design, etc. I know Rome wasn't built in a day, but I have really worked at this. I wish I could see just one affiliate sale, that's all. This is no way a thread hijack, it was a frustration oriented post.
I've noticed that it seems to depend on which ranks more highly. Some of my uses of articles written by others ranks much more highly than the ezine from which I'd gotten them. Do a search for the longtail keywords and you'll find my use of it.
backlinks also play a pretty big part in which site the search engines give more weight to. the more backlinks that pointing to a site, the more weight the search engines will give to that site over the others.
I've done a lot of work and experiments with SEO and stuff. Have been doing it for years. There's one thing I know for sure, there's a lot less importance to duplicate contact and penalties on that behalf than most people think (or want you to think). Search engines don't rate pages on a first come first serve basis (that's not even nearly fair, a page copied directly from another page that has not yet been indexed should not be granted automatic content ownership right, considering that it might take a couple of days for the search engine to crawl your site). Search engines rate pages on importance, and there's one thing backlinks and a lot of them, the more relevent the better but the more you get the better.
To start with it is generally a filter NOT a penalty; more on Duplicate Content As far as things like article marketing, Matt Cutts said; http://www.stephanspencer.com/search-engines/matt-cutts-interview Google webmastercentralblog says this about it: If you want to dig into some more technical stuff there are some recent Google Patents in the form of; DETECTING DUPLICATE AND NEAR-DUPLICATE FILES and System and methods for analyzing Boilerplate