How can I avoid duplicate content penalty moving some content

In the very near future I'm thinking about taking down one of my websites. I wrote very little on the site, but over time have accumulated some good articles, all hand written by me usually over 2000 words.

I intend to start a new site with a partner that is much broader in subject, but I want to reuse those articles. Is there a way I can avoid the risk of the duplicate content penalty? I'm not at all opposed to pulling the original articles down...I just wonder if google will still mark it as duplicate.

I guess what I'm after is if anyone knows how long content has to be 'unavailable' before it can appear somewhere else as fresh content.

Any ideas or suggestions? Off the wall suggestions or even "don't take down the original and rewrite the articles" types of answers are welcome too. I'm just really confused about the best way to go about this.

 

Well, you could hire some writers to do a re-write for your articles that's one of the ways that you could avoid a duplicated content penalty Try outsourcing somewhere if possible.

 

Yeep I also suggest do it manually it. with some skill and you will have fresh new content based on those good articles, as you mentioned.
don't take risk of letting machine do it,
u will be penalised ,believe me
Good luck

 

You could try one of the many freelancing websites like GAF and Odesk i'm quite sure you'll find a suitable enough canidate to help you out with your requirements =]

 

It's funny, I outsource nearly all the writing on some other sites, but it never occurred to me to outsource rewriting my old articles. Thanks. I'm not sure if I'll do this or not, or if I'll just rewrite them myself.

I was hoping not to have to rewrite ...but I gather from the general nature of everyone's comments that rewriting is the best solution

 

You can add this with your article "original Source: site name", Google will not mark it as duplicate.

You can check this http://marketsandmarkets.wordpress.com/

 

it's generally accepted that there isnt any duplicate content penalty as such, just a 'unique content bonus'.

If you're worried, spin / wrangle your articles to make them unique before using them.

 

Add some original portions and reformat the articles

 

You should hire some article writers
and they should adopt the

70 to 80 percent unique policy then you can check the imaginary results in real life !

 

I asked the same question a while back and the answer i was given was do a 301 redirect from your old domain to your new one..

 

I've considered doing a 301 redirect, but I figured that since the domain itself had changed that it might not make a difference. I don't know how google tests 'uniqueness'. Does it do so with constant updates to see if an old article is still in existence (doubtful), or does it do so against its own cache (maybe).

 

what if we use the free articles?

 

Do it manually.

 

Continue to host the old domain...

On a page-by-page basis, 301 redirect requests for each old URL to the URL on the new site whose content most closely resembles the content of the page at the old URL. The 301 redirect will give the URL on the new site credit for the inbound links to the redirected URL on the old site. And if you make sure to redirect to the page on the new site whose content most closely represents the content of the page at the old redirect URL, the link text for the inbound links to the old URL SHOULD be applicable to the new URL.

If you had the article previously at http://www.oldexample.com/article1.html and republish it at http://www.newexample.com/article-1.html and put a 301 redirect in place from http://www.oldexample.com/article1.html to http://www.newexample.com/article-1.html then several things are going to happen at Google:

1) credit for all inbound links (and the associated link text) to http://www.oldexample.com/article1.html is going to be transfered to http://www.newexample.com/article-1.html. This also means your PR will be transfered.
2) "originator" status for the content will be transfered from http://www.oldexample.com/article1.html to http://www.newexample.com/article-1.html.
3) the original URL http://www.oldexample.com/article1.html will be replaced by http://www.newexample.com/article-1.html in Google's index (I specifically say Google here because the not-so smart people at Yahoo! seem to leave the old URL in their index and continue to display it even though the have detected the 301).

So if you 301 redirect your articles to the new site, the version on the new site will be considered by Google to be the original version once they detect the 301s and recrawl all of the old URLs' inbound links.

BTW... There is no such thing as a Duplicate Content Penalty. Penalties at Google prevent you from ranking on page 1. They typically make it so you can't rank any higher than a certain position regardless of what you do until you correct the issue that caused you to be penalized and Google lifts the penalty. Many people refer to them as -30,-50,-60, -350, -950, etc. penalties because no matter how many links you throw at the page Google seems to prevent the page from ranking higher than 30, 50, 60, etc. until the penalty is lifted. Once you've fixed the violation and Google has lifted the penalty, then and only then can you go back to possibly ranking on page 1.

This does NOT happen when Google detects duplicate content. Google is looking at 200+ ranking factors when they rank a URL for a particular keyword phrase. A simplified explanation of what they are doing is that Google essentially scores your page for each of those 200+ ranking factors, sums up the individual ranking factor scores (with some weighted more heavily than others) to get an overall ranking score, and then orders the SERPs from highest overall ranking score to lowest.

Some subset of those 200+ ranking factors are actually based on the content of the page. Many others are based on things other than the content of your page like domain age, domain trust, domain authority, link text used to link to your URL, whether the search phrase appears in the title/h1/h2/content of the page linking to your URL (relevance of page linking to your URL), whether the search phrase appears in inbound links to the page linking to your URL (again, a measure of relevance of page linking to your URL), PR of your page, etc.

When a page is found to be duplicate, the ranking factors based on the content of the page simply score much lower than they would normally have ranked if the content had been original. But this does NOT mean that you cannot rank on page 1 or even at position 1. You can compensate for poor content based ranking factor scores by excelling in other ranking factor scores like having more or better inbound links from relevant pages w/ relevant link text since it's the overall score that the results are ordered by, not any one individual ranking factor score.

 

i think: Duplicate content is an issue to google because it finds it hard to deal with. Due to the nature of how the internet is going you are getting one piece of content being copied/scrapped in dozens of locations. Some of these duplications will be valid, a blog getting digged for example, so should be a positive rather than a negative.

If you have www.abcdefg.com and www.abcdefg.co.uk (which both hold the same site but are not redirected)then this is also duplicate content and can kind of link to each other cleverly. Google doesn't like this and isn't coping with it very well so publishes its dislike.

As always, the is no "right" way and many different approaches seem to work, and then when you do them again elsewhere you get spanked.

Oh, Canonical , your post appeared after i submitted, one quick question...

Do you think that a penalty can be applied to the keyword relevance of the page or the page itself? In other words can a penalty stop a page ranking highly for one keyword whilst the page is ranked page 1 line 1 for another keyword???

 

My belief is that they can do both - penalize a URL or penalize a URL for a particular keyword phrase. Or at least I've seen what appears to be evidence of both on various threads/posts on Google's Webmaster Help Forums. From a technology standpoint, it's certainly feasible that they "could" implement code to support both, but it's hard to say definitively that they have or have not since it's rare that Google will actually confirm that a page is being penalized (via a message in WMT).

 

Wow Canonical...that is exactly the info I was after. That is my ideal situation, doing minor or no rewrites, and being able to pass the inboud link and originator status to the new article. So from what your saying, I should be able to do a 301 so long as I keep the permelink, titles, and meta information more or less similar.

That sounds perfect actually.

 

Nothing else really needs to be said..... he has said what you should do above. No need to spin or rewrite the articles.... just do the 301 redirect... you will be fine.

 

As long as you take down the content from your original website and only include it in your new one, you will not be facing content penalties.