I'm a newbie at this so I'm coming to the gurus with perhaps a dumb question. What is the deal with duplicate content and how it affects search? I see conflicting things...then I see folks posting the same article to multiple directories. Does it really affect it and how?
http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=212 Some duplicate content may cause pages to be filtered at the time of serving of results by search engines, and there is no guarantee as to which version of a page will show in results and which versions won’t. Duplicate content may also lead to some sites and some pages not being indexed by search engines at all, or may result in a search engine crawling program stopping the indexing all of the pages of a site because it finds too many copies of the same pages under different URLs.
While there may be some penalties associated with duplicate content, I've found that it is never a bad thing to post duplicate content on different sites that are loved by Google. While there is no guarantee of which version will actually show up on Google, the key is to have at least one or two copies (perhaps even more) show up, right? Of course I'm not saying to write just one article on your niche/topic and post it all over the web. You have to rinse and repeat with different articles, BUT you definitely want each article as widely distributed over the net as possible.
http://blog.mohammadafaq.com/2010/01/24/there-is-no-such-thing-as-duplicate-content-penalty/ Here's an official video from Google. According to the video there is no penalty but if you ask me then you should have unique content if you wanna rank high
Usually, duplicate content can't be indexed by Google and other search engines. Besides, much duplicate content may make your site unfriendly with search engines and you can't gain a good SERP because of the duplicate content.
I think, in regards to dublicate content, your questions were answered above. But, when it comes to article directories and submitting same articles to different diretories, you should always change your articles, if you are submitting them to different directories. This way, each article can get indexed and you will have more traffic and more backlinks to your site.
There is no real penalty for duplicated contents. This is a challenge of domain trust matter. The good example is - If your website and Ezinearticles has the same exact similar article published, the one under Ezineraticles would be ranked higher without a doubt. I hope this example made clear for you.
Duplicate content has been and always will be a natural part of the Web. It’s nothing to be afraid of. If your site has some dupe content for whatever reason, you don’t have to lose sleep. They’re not going to banish your entire website from ever showing up when someone searches for what you offer. The duplicate content probably won’t show up in searches.
well one of my websites was all about poems & speeches since these were famous poems & speeches by famous people and were already present on other websites my site got banned by google few months back and I can't get it re indexed.
Theories are many but as far as it goes Original content rules. Duplicate content are n guarantee for a good track record, if you know what i mean.
As you said it is OK to subbit one new article everyone to many different directories? But if don't do like this, it is difficult to write too many article one day for different directories
Google is moving towards simply filtering and dropping the duplicate content pages from its pages and index. Article directory links are not very important nowadays because when you check your Google Webmaster Tools panel even after submitting your articles to hundreds of sites, only a handful of them might be listed there, even if they all have already been crawled by the Google bot.
The Duplicate Content Penalty is a more of a myth than anything, obviously unique content is always best, but this isn't an issue that becomes a matter of life or death for your website/blog. Rather than just trying to repeat what Google has already done, their blog explains it already: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html
thanks guys this is all really helpful. basically you're saying it won't hurt you to have duplicate content, but try to create unique content wherever/whenever possible I think?
There is NO duplicate content penalty. IF you have to say there is , then the penalty might be that only the original version of the page gets listed in the search engine and the duplicates don't get listed at all.
No need to worry about duplicate content. There is no google penalty. However not all pages show up in SERPs