Hi there, I'm wondering, how do google and the other search engine's go about looking for duplicate content on sites? Lyric sites and game cheat websites are just two examples of websites that have near same content on a vast amount of websites. How come they are not penalized? I wanted to add video game cheats to my main site, vgescape.com which is already ranked in SERPS and getting SERP traffic. I also want to repeat these cheats on individual video game cheat sites (one for ps3, one for xbox, etc) and maybe repeat the cheats of vgescape on another new cheat site too. If I do this, this means 3-4 sites with the same content. Would google penalize me or recognize that this niche allows duplicate information?
Google will actively try and find duplicate content. They do not want to rank the same page over and over. http://www.copyscape.com/ can help show you some duplication and you can learn how to avoid it. Tip - mix the content up - I could take excerpts from 5 articles in google's index and use a few quotes from each of them and a link to the article. This would be seen as unique content even though its just sections - by combining and mixing content you can creat new content. Make use of rss and a few lines of highly unique text at the top of the page go a long way. That and a unique html structure.
Good point. I've also noticed sites that quote extensively from the bible and a comparison of google, yahoo and msn serps suggested to me that they weren't penalised. Maybe Google make a special case for such sites, somehow. Duplicate content penalties do exist though, I've experienced them myself. Maybe if there are large numbers of copies of text,then Google figures out it's a seminal text and no penalty applies. However, if there are just a couple of identical copies, then one is likely plagiarised, and dropped... I don't know! One day I'll get to the bottom of how google handles duplicate content issues... Cheers, Paz.
Yeah, hmm, for example, theres a free cheat sites database around that any person can use, but the main site using it is on the first page of google for many SERPs. Thats a ton of duplicate information.
How would Google handle duplicate content if one version of that content was in frames and the other was in non frames, both with different title tags? Is this a violation of Googles webmaster guidelines?