How damaging is duplicate content?

I have seen duplicate shopping sites get penlized in Google. It might be a different story for an article publishing site.

 

I think submitting web press releases is better. It's even better to get a unique press release published by a newspaper on paper, website or news.

Press releases should different on each newspaper.

That's mostly what the milliondollarhomepage.com guy did. He didn't use articles, he used unique press releases.

Now people are writing articles about him and his website.

 

I am certain G gives a duplicate content penalty under some circumstances. Chopster, as you must know, G does not treat all sites the same. Just like not all adwords/adsense participants play under the same rules as everyone else.

Other penalties exist, too. One of my sites was just banned by a ping service for duplicate content. I won't name the service, but it is newish, very popular and run by someone who is very vocal about splogs (Which my site is not, despite use of some free articles).

 

It's an interesting article, but still the author is doesn't proove anything and is speculating. I've noticed that by looking into the SERPs for articles that I submit, most of them are in RSS feeds. Is it possible that the author's numbers dropped so significantly due to the links not existing in the RSS feeds on so many sites anymore?

*Hmmm, I just looked up an old article I submitted and it has dropped a lot. Down to 166 results, when it was in the thousands right after submitting it. Maybe there is a dup content filter.

So if there is a dup content filter. Why do people even bother submitting articles at all? Google is just going to filter out all their backlinks making it pointless to submit your article in the first place. Right?

 

Here is what makes the most sense out of the article.

Yoo take an article that is duplicated accross 5000 thousand diferrent sites on the interenet. Do a search on a couple on an 4-5 words of text from the article. Google search results will contain the article a couple of times, not 5000 times.

Google doesn't feel that it helps its users by displaying the exact same content over and over. The same would be true if a webmaster decided to make a bunch of new sites with basically the same content as the original one.

 

But do you really believe that 5000 sites are featuring your article without the influence of RSS feeds? I doubt there are 5000 webmasters that are looking at an article and copying and pasting it into their website. No article is "that" good.

Most of these 5000 sites are just hyperlinking to the EzineArticle site or GoArticle site where the article is located. These hyperlinks (with the name of your article as the title) are in RSS feeds and eventually as new article links are added to the feed, the older ones drop off. When your article drops off, GoogleBot doesn't pick it up anymore when it re-spiders the page, hence the drastic decrease in backlinks in the SERPs.

This seems to make the most sense why so many articles get thousands of backlinks showing up in google for the first month, then they are all gone in the second month. Perhaps it's not the content filter, but just the feed on all those sites is pushing the link to your article off their site.

*In fact, doing a search again on Google for that same article I submitted that brought back 165 backlinks. I'm seeing that the large marjoirty of them are the websites that actually did copy and paste my article, rather than link to is through a feed.

 

The important thing here is that the Google SERPs display a couple of copies and ignore the rest.

 

I'm seeing 165 websites (copies) that are featuring my article in the SERPs.

 

Are you talking about Google?

 

Yes.

I created an article a little over a month ago. The SERPS had in the thousands at one point and has now dropped to 165. A very similar scenerio to the link you posted where that guy saw a huge drop in the SERPS as well (but he attributed it to a duplicate content filter).

My theory is that it is a drop due to all the sites with RSS Feeds to Ezinearticles not carrying the link anymore...rather than a duplicate content filter. I could be wrong, but it seems to make sense, because the large majority of those 165 sites that are still appearing in the Google SERPS are websites that cut and pasted my article onto their own site.

I can private message you the name of the article if you are interested in checking it out.

As a side note, wouldn't a dup content filter be something Google would publicly tell everyone about rather than keep it a secret? It seems it would make more sense for them to make this public, so that webmasters stop duplicating content.

 

You have a point. We cannot use this as evidence that Google filters out duplicate content. On the other< from my personal experience I can safely say that "Google filters out duplicate content".

 

I wonder what the chances are that they filter just "some" of the duplicate content.

 

You can use this link to show how Google does penalize duplicate content.

I went to the duplicate content page you mentions, selected a quote from one of the review, and did a search for it on Google.

As you can see the original review is listed as #1, and the duplicate page is listed as #2. The original review only has a PR of 2, and the duplicate page has a PR of 4. If there was no duplicate content penalty, I would expect to see the PR4 page listed at #1.

 

PR does not necessarily indicate the rank that the site will have in the Google SERPs. There could be a lot of factors and variables involved with why the lower PR indexed higher in the SERPs.

At first glance, I can see that the most obvious would be the SEO involved with the #1 page. Both have the title of the article in <title> tags, but the #1 page has the title in <h2> tags. The page also has the article as the first 50 words of the page, with no navigation link text getting in the way of the GoogleBot.

 

A quote from site-reference.com.

SEO Duplicate Web Content Penalty Myth Exploded