Nice discussion,this made some things clear out of my mind. What about the contents that people out there are making by fetching and mixing feeds from different blogs. I see more than 5 times the feed counts than the visitors in my everyday stats.
Just look around duplicate content is everywhere.......syndication is power!!........so what filter, what penalty...Duplicate content ranks differently for every site that the content is on.....Some sites have high trust, others low trust and some no trust....hence different rankings for different keywords...If your page has more trust in the search engines than the other guy then you'll rank higher duplicate content or not..
Refer the official guide here: What does Google do about it? During our crawling and when serving search results, we try hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has articles in "regular" and "printer" versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one version to list. In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. However, we prefer to focus on filtering rather than ranking adjustments ... so in the vast majority of cases, the worst thing that'll befall webmasters is to see the "less desired" version of a page shown in our index. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html
top answer! the ranking of the content actually depends on the over all authority of the website!! if you post duplicate content on a site that has good authority then it will still rank better than the original article on a less authority website! example - ezinearticles
Wow, this thread has produced some great discussion that I've found very helpful. I think a lot of of people could take a lot away from this thread as an overall source on the subject
Yep......R U an Ezinearticles lover too?.... If you aren't using Ezinearticles then you ain't livin'!.... or just don't want to get buttloads of traffic and resources and make some serious money....Ezinearticles and Google really changed my life....So go publish them articles and get everyone to publish your content....and point back to the source of the "original content" This is why Google encourages others to link back to the original source of the content that they publish...and also in Ezinearticles too, the publishers are "required" to point back to the source....this way you will gain more link juice,authority and hopefully in a perfect world you will outrank the others using your content..
In my case its opposite... the content of my site has been copied by some other site and I have been penalized.... please help me....
yes duplicate content is the big prob for google so must make content for users not for search engine.