Duplicate Content Penalty - A myth or a reality

Duplicate content will attract penalty, something everyone thought was true and many of us still do (including me). But is there any hard evidence that supports this theory? If the penalty does exist, how do search engines decide what is original and what is duplicate?

 

Duplicate content does get penalized. It is one of the most important parameters of a Search Engine, if it wants to be an effective one. Logically as well if you think, it makes sense. If duplication is not tapped, then the very concept of search engine and ranks given to websites would go for a Toss.

Simple practical experience, open a blog, put duplicate content on it and just watch!

 

As far as i experienced, duplicate content will panelised if your site is totally new and u have copied whole content from old and authority sites.
If your site is old and performing well than duplicate content will work, i have seen many sites lets say news sites...people just copy paste news and they write Click here ( here they will put original post link). so in this case it wont get penalties.

 

Dup content... you can get away with it for years or you can get penalized is 3 days... but jg ^^ said it all.

 

yes. duplicate content gets penalized by google. i have evidence also since one of my friend's site got penalized because of duplicacy but i can't disclose it here.
I think it depends on the age of the site, which content is original and which is duplicate

 

So lets take a hypothetical situation in which Google penalizes duplicate content. There are billions of web pages indexed by Google and the process is ongoing with thousands of pages being added daily. Is it commercially and technically viable to compare every single page with every other page on the Internet???

 

Well it is. See comparing of pages with the kind of technology is piece of cake. Search engines giants like Google have self developed tools that can compare and throw out result in seconds, that too for millions of pages. For them, investing in such tools is nothing but peanuts. on a smaller scale you get many software which has scripts that can compare a number of documents in a folder and throw you results.

 

Point taken. Based on your post I would say that search engines have the capability to deal with Peta bytes of data and without burdening their resources! The question now would be: What parameters do search engines use to decide which content is original and which is duplicate. Is it the date of indexing ??? what about social media stuff wherein all content listed is duplicate because they come from a different source???

 

Duplication causes penalty..

Search engines decide depending on the age of the domains

 

Duplicate content will cause the page to be "gray barred" not penalized. If Google applies a penalty (loss in SERP position), it is for something else.

This is quite common in database driven web sites where the template used does not display ~50% unique text. When the design increases the unique content above the ~50%, the page is indexed and PR applied.

But if it is a copy & paste dup content, the site (not the page) receives a penalty (loss or removal in SERPs).

Note: Goggle does not explain this anywhere, so everyone is still guessing.

 

Ofcourse the resources would be used in definitely! No doubt about that. And giants like google or yahoo, their backbone runs on it. Hence for them, its just like a profitable investment.

now yes, questions do popup regarding what SE considers and how. Well that is something these people don't want to reveal and it keeps changing with time. And as such, its just not on duplicate content that the parameters are restricted to, there is more to it. That more is what we don't know. But if this question is put to experienced webmasters, i am sure they might be able to guess it.

 

ya duplicate content has problems with google

 

If "duplicate content" the way some people see it was penalized, Ezinearticles would have gone down in smoke long, long, ago. They have articles ON THEIR SITE that allow others to take the very same articles and use them on their own sites. Some articles get "published" dozens of times across the internet. Yet~Ezinearticles continues to be strong and have high SE placement. And the site is 8 Years, 9 Months, 17 days old, and carries a Page Rank of 6, according to dn Scoop:

http://www.dnscoop.com/

 

Everyone seems to agree that duplicate content would attract some kind of penalty, the king and magnitude is still unclear. I was digging a bit deeper to know more about it and found this post on Google' s official blog

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html

Maybe this could shed some more light on this contentious issue.

 

The question is how you define a duplicate content or how they decide or define for a duplicate content. Even search engine are showing duplicate content also.

We all know that there are billions or even trillions of pages on the internet this days. Even google or other search engine have the fastest and most modern technology installed in their data center comparing billion of page from time to time will take a huge time and hardware resources.

I have also write about this duplicate content in my blog http://www.bayaw.com/?p=49 , I made some experiment also more or less than 2 months ago and I guess duplicate content is okey as long as you make some tweak

Or maybe duplicate content is more on manual work in googles part, if someone reported a site using a duplicate content....

Well it's just my thought

 

I had posted similar information while ago on this issue here:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=8943819#post8943819

 

Duplicate content is placed in the supplemental index.

 

I used some articles from ezine articles and they never came in search engines.

 

This is what I have heard as well.

 

duplicate content will panelised means that search engines will punish a website for violations of the engine's terms of service.