I hope this is the right section to post this... Let's say you have a blog in which you post articles from ezinearticles and other free article sites. They will not be original, so they'll probably be perceived by the search engines as duplicate content. My question is: if you have enough comments on a blog post (let's say more than 50% than the size of the article), will those comments be considered as fresh content in your blog post? Will the post be considered original and the duplicate content penalty removed?
Google says there is no duplicate content penalty. They just show the page that they think is the original content higher in SERPs. Comments are a part of the page content. If someone searches for the words that appear in the comments (and not in the original article), your page may be displayed higher than the original article.
Yes, comments count as content to Google. You can even SEO comments you make on other sites for better rankings, on your own sites too.
In your case comments may prove to be very significant and as everybody else has rightly said that comments are a part of the content hence take them seriously and use them to your advantage. Make sure that the comments are interactive, genuine, and as detailed as possible. This will help your site getting many keywords for free. Even if you're using contents from some other sites then also don't present them exactly the same or only with slight modification to give others (and the Search Engines as well) a feel of duplicate content. Give them your personal touch and make them useful to the readers. Give due credit to the source of the info used by you. Thanks, Geek http://geekexplains.blogspot.com
I once had a article delisted because someone with a higher rank site stole the first paragraph from the article. This resulted in my page being penalized for duplicate content even though he copied maybe 25% of my whole post. So if your post was completely copied by a higher ranking site, your whole page will be delisted even if you have a bunch of unique comments on your real page
dbbrock1: That sucks! I thought the search engine would consider the oldest page as the original source, and not the one with the highest PR.
I once submitted to digg, just for a test, an article from ezinearticles which could be found on thousands of other websites. Guess what? 24 hours after submitting it to digg, when I searched for that article title, the #1 listing was digg