I've read so many posts about this topic. Some people say Google looks at the entire webpage, not the actual article within. If everybody had identical webpage’s then your back links would get capped for duplicate content. I tend to agree with this theory as I have seen pages get number 1 Google rankings using Wikipedia text word for word as the main part of their page. And I'm talking about the same exact text being used in countless other websites. The funny thing is seeing a website getting ranked before Wikipedia using the same exact text found on Wikipedia. I tend to believe that site layout plays a major role. All the links, pictures, affiliate ads and everything else on the site is going to be different than the next guys site even when they employ the same text as the page theme. To me this proves that Google looks at the entire web page, not the article within. Google also has a tool that lets you know if your site is using what Google considers duplicate content. You will find it within this section: http://www.google.com/webmasters/start/index.html I have had pages on some of my sites sound off that duplicate content alarm. When you look at the pages Google is calling duplicate content they don't even appear similar, especially the text within. It has more to do with the layout of the page in my experience. I've seen where webmasters make websites with the exact banners, layout etc with different names and URLs but the page is basically identical. SPAM is what is going on there and Google seems to know it. I could be wrong. I'm no genius but when Google says duplicate they mean something different than what most people are lead to believe. If duplicate content got so much demotion then how could sites like ezines get such high Google rankings. So many of the articles on ezines are on many of the other article sites word for word. Wouldn't they get devaluated for duplicate content also? Food For Thought. Peace, Herman
Check the smaller article sites that have the same articles as ezines. You may find that many of them fall under duplicate content. Search for things in DMOZ and you'll find that many of the sites never get a listing... yeah, the bigger clones will make it in, but many of the smaller ones never seem to make the grade. The filters are seemingly there and seemingly work, though just how they work does seem to be a matter of speculation. You can counter much of the duplicate issues by simply changing the words of your submissions, the titles, and the anchor text of the links. One easy method (which some of the autmatic re-writers use) is to simply plug your article into Bablefish translate it into another language, then back to english. Once that is done go through it and make sure it makes sense. The layout of the page can really matter too... the very same article on a forum, a blog, an article site, and etc, can get the top ten listings even though they all match, though that does not happen a lot I reckon... but it can be kept in mind for just how many times any given article needs to be re-written.
Cool idea and thanks for your insight on your entire reply. It is true that some sites with the same article get far better rankings than others. The thing is this happens all the time with sites about the same topic with entirely different text and none of the same articles. Once again I think we have to take site layout and several other ranking factors into consideration. Peace, Herman