I've been doing a lot of research lately, and my results are showing that duplicate content as it's "preached" is just a myth. I'm finding that duplicate content is only an issue if you are using cookie cutter type sites. Has anyone else really tested the duplicate content theory with the different search engines out there?
It only hurts you if it is on the same domain or server(such as the "cookie cutter" sites you mentioned). There have been times I have used the article directories to keep putting new pages on a couple of my sites and the "new" content coming on at a regular schedule has often increased my PR. I have one site (book reviews) that is nothing but articles from the directories and in less than two months it had a PR2 listing because I added a new review almost every day. After a few months I quit posting and in about six months it had dropped back down to a zero. "Fresh" content, whether original or not seems to be more important for the spiders to find. If duplicate content was so damaging the news sites would not rank so high.
If you include a link in the article and have it passed around ( copied ) you will have lots of "duplicate content" but also lots of backlinks back to your site. Those scrapers are getting smarter though.
The new Google Caffeine algorithm is much smarter than before. In the past, I had seen two exactly duplicate articles ranked on the first page, but now it's impossible with the new algorithm. Fresh content got priority by Google, but article syndication is also counted by Google!
i have two identical blogs ranking for the same term so it's not impossible. ( one is hosted on blogger and one on worpress )
I think it doesn't matter whether content is duplicate or not. Reason!! There are numerous wordpress blogs that use automated plugins which fetch articles from article directories and post them on these blogs. People still use these and their blogs do achieve higher traffic and rankings....This I think will answer your question
It will only apply if you have two different domains on the same server. I did it awhile back ago and google de-indexed the newest site.
It's almost impossible to rank for anything that pays using duplicate content, whether you use a plugin, post it by hand or have a monkey do it. Anyone that says otherwise, ask them to show you a site and tell you what key words it ranks for. Find me one for credit cards, acne, debt, loans, travel, arthritis ANYTHING that can be effectively monetized, and I'll KYA. You won't of course.
From my point of view...It is not true.. If you are using 100% duplicate content then you will find a problem.