I run a website that generates several new articles every day ( http://www.doyouremember.co.uk ). I also have a forum on a subdomain ( http://forums.doyouremember.co.uk ) and I automatically feed the new articles from the main site into the forum as something to discuss. Is this duplication of content harming the primary site?
If the duplicated article appears at the top of a thread and there are numerous posts discussing it, there shouldn't be a problem. If there are identical pages on the main site and the forum subdomain, then one set will get filtered out.
Since google treats a subdomain almost like different domain it won't get filtered out, just ranked worse. As long as the page content isn't exactly the same, it's not a big problem and certainly won't trigger any penalty, so go ahead with it.
Well as it happens, not many people are commenting on it so the bulk of the content on the page IS the same. How does Google determine which is the originating site when it sees duplicate content? How does it choose which site to rank worse? You can see an example of what I am doing here: http://forums.doyouremember.co.uk/recently-remembered/ If you search on http://www.doyouremember.co.uk you will see the original articles for each post
That's a bit tricky. Google doesn't see the site which first published the content as the original one, but the one with more trustrank and link power pointing to it. So, just make sure to push your main site more than the forum
As Scripter mentioned, Google does treat a sub domain as a different site. But if you are worried about it, why not change the Title a little and a sentence or two in the first paragraph. That would be a little trouble, but maybe it would give you a peace of mind. Good Luck, Zeek
that will raise eyebrows of "g" even if its on subdomain, if can avoid it, then i'll suggest not to go for it period
Another thing you can do here to make your forum copy a little more unique, is in vB where you setup the RSS poster you can include text after the More.. tag. Write something like, "This article was published to our main page, but we have included it here for discussion" just fluff it out to a paragraph with some good keywords, links prompting members to register etc. For your forum will have.. Article More.. Filler Text This has a double benefit, it makes your copy more unique plus it prompts existing members to comment, new members to join or commit an action and you can even link to some of your other forum sections telling people to check them out which will increase page views and internal linking structure for SEO.
You are more than welcome remember. Since you are running a forum, i don't see the need of posting the entire article on the forum. You could start a new thread with a discussion on the given topic, then link back to the original article. This way you could circumvent the issue surrounding duplicate content.