Ok, So I run a linkbuilding service/web marketing firm, and I did a little testing. I was watching one of Howie Shwartz's videos and wanted to try something out. When submitting content for clients, I spin to around 30%+ to insure that Google does not mark it as duplicate content. But, that takes quite a bit of work to do it correctly, and I never thought twice about it. It seemed as though it was a "duh." Then a few weeks ago I decided to test my previous knowledge. I kind of had an epiphany when I realized that duplicate content can't POSSIBLY be a negative in Google's eyes. After reading an associated press' article, and then reading the same one again on another news site, I realized that I was reading duplicate content. Then I thought, well maybe Google indexes everything, and saves the best for first. Then I did this search: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke likely will face tough questions this week from lawmakers about taxpayer bailouts of financial companies, slow-moving government efforts to curb home foreclosures and the possibility that the Fed's unprecedented steps It was a story I pulled from AP.org, I copied the first paragraph in it's entirety, then I was amazed by the results. Google found this 21,600 times? Ok, this is weird. I'm finding duplicate content, on authoritative sites, and Google doesn't seem to be punishing it. Ok, now, so why is newsrunner first? (a pr6) and yahoo behind them? Well, that's for another day. So then I tested it out on my own. I had a client who agreed to it, he has two different sites with similar content. One of his sites was newer, and lower in the rankings, and one of his sites was already on the first page position 3. So, I did a submission for the first page one (created about 50 high PR backlinks to it with spinning and insuring that I was distributing "unique" content). After 2 weeks it moved... nowhere. Of course, that being said, his competition has been well rooted, and he's been getting plenty of traffic and conversions, so he's not worried. I did the same thing for his newer site. Newer domain, about 13 pages deep at the time. I used the same article, but this time I didn't spin it. I submitted the exact same article word for word to around 50 sites (again). 2 weeks later? I couldn't find it on the 13th page. I looked back, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20? 25? Are you kidding me, it completely dropped out? Not good. So, he calls me up with surprising news. His second site had finally made a sale. So, I started from page 1, and to my surprise, found it on page 3. I did the linkto: query and found that like I suspected, all the sites showed up, duplicate content and all.
I thought if you try submitting an article that you have already posted somewhere else the article site wouldn't publish it? I guess I'm wrong ...
I thought this was interesting and worth sharing. I don't know if it's true or not, just that it may explain something about your experiment. Contrary to popular opinion, Google does not penalize web sites that have duplicated content on it, but the advances in filtering techniques mean that duplicate content will rarely feature well in SERPS. [2] [3].
Well, you'd think right? But, then, Google is saying it's going to pick it's favorite duplicated content. Then, how does your duplicate content rate above the other?
I would think, most logically, it would be the site that had the article first. The others sites have 'duplicates', not the initial post.
its a myth for sure. the whole Newscorp Network is Dup Content. From Foxnews, AP and all the sister websites they all have the same story .
There is a possiblity that your duplicate contents which you have posted in another site may would have indexed earlier and thus it is ranked upper...
there may be no penalty, but it doesn't do you any good. You need to understand what search engines are trying to do. There's a good explanation here - duplicate content - myth?
I disagree with this post, i think duplicating content will ensure you are below the site you copied the content from. With a niche keyword you may still rank towards the first page, but you wouldn't rank that highly. I have a site that had manufacturer supplied product descriptions that lots of other sites were using. I have had great success with re-writing these descriptions to make them unique and help push them further up the search engines. I guess the problem lies where your average site owner doesn't know how to write good optimised content so they don't rank well. If you then copy someone elses quality content you may rank higher, but you'll never get to the top.
Thanks for your input, I hope you're not a lawyer. Anyways, I appreciate everyone responding to this thread as it's a big part of my company (and a huge expense). It costs me almost as much to create the article as to rewrite or spin it logically. So, if I can cut that out, that's a huge chunk that I can either drop from my price (to become even more competitive) or keep as extra profit. Please continue with response!
It seems alot of discussion is surrounding who had the article online first, however what if you were the content creator and you simultaneously posted your content to say 10 different but related websites at the same time? In that scenario, Google cannot possibly decide who had the content first and can therefore not rank one site ahead of the other in terms of the article in question.
Content spinning is still dangerous. this is good for SEO if it really works. I still go for original content.
The higher ranked websites are at the advantage that they are spidered more often and are therefore likely to get indexed first. There have to be lots of deep factors in the dupe content algo. I wrote several articles which I posted on one of my sites and made sure was indexed almost immediately but other pages scraped it and ended up knocking me back down he SERPs
I totally agree, if you create the original content, put it on your site, get indexed first, then distribute that content all pointing back to your site, then you won't have any issues with SERPs. If you simply take content from a site (that's already indexed), then most likely, you will not see any gain for your SERPs.