Duplicate Content Penalty - A myth or a reality

I am overwhelmed with the responses and a healthy discussion. I was discussing the same with my colleague and he took the onus to write an article about it. He just posted excerpt of his article on our corporate blog and wanted it to share it with you all. Comments would be greatly appreciated.

 

The duplicate content is for the benefit of the user as in shopping carts and the print version of an article.

The supplemental index still exists. Google has stopped labeling "Supplemental Results". But as always supplemental results only show when there are few results from the main index.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/supplemental-goes-mainstream.html

 

Well I agree with Bogart on this. Supplemental index does exist.

 

Dupe content does exist and does get penalized. I've did endless experiments to test it. Even if during the first 2-3 months the sites don't show any penalization signs, in some of my tests, some sites got removed completely from search engines listings , some started to receive less to no traffic.

Just imagine you are having the same content, hundreds others is having. Why would your site be ranked #1 for searching a term from your articles?

If you are using blogs, you may want to give a look on Uniquefier which may solve this dupe content issue.

 

You can never completely remove duplicate content though and often its needed, you just have to use it where it will benefit your reader I think instead of wanting it to get rank. I have some duplicate content apges from wikipedia and they index fine

 

Duplicate content just gets put in the Google supplemental index.. so no traffic from SERPS..

but other than that no big issue.

 

Those who believe duplicate content gets penalized... are the ones who will never earn enough to make a living.

 

what makes you say that