Duplicate content?

So I bought an expired domain. It had 16 pages on it before (checked in archive.org).

I though it would be easy to just copy the text I found in archive.org but I realised that another site is using the same text and layout (they just saved the page and reuploaded it to another URL).

As this text was on my domain first(I'm not sure though) what would happen if I republished it? Will I get a duplicate content penalty or would he?

There is a lot of text there and it'll be hard to rewrite it + it is a dmoz listed site and I'm affraid that if I change the text I would loose the listing there

 

Duplicate content penalties usually happen when your site is 100% duplicate content. I think it would be perfectly ok to restore those articles to where they belong - on your domain name where they came from to start with.

The worst that is going to happen is that google will see the article as duplicate content, and just not index it - that is a lot different then actually getting a penality.

 

Just remember the person who originally wrote it may still be the legitimate copyright holder. I'm not familiar with Internet copyright laws yet but I'd suggest you look it up. How long had the domain been expired before you got it? Perhaps the first owner just didn't get to renew on time?

 

Simply registering a domain does not give you copyrights to content previously hosted on a web site in that domain. Now if you actually purchased the web site from the owner, that would be a different story.

Cheers,

Drew

 

Google understands that a lot of the content is normal to be seen on a lot of sites. So duplicating it wont be that much of a problem, just make sure you have the rights to do so.