What exactly is considered "duplicate content"?

Hi,

I recently started using articles from an "article site", to add content to my site. These articles are submitted by their authors with permission to publish, as long as their link to their website, or email address, is left intact at the bottom of the article.

I realize that many others are using the same articles, but in different combinations and in different areas of their sites. There are thousands of these articles.

My question: What exactly is considered "duplicate content"?

Does that mean an entire duplicate site? Just a page? A percentage? Duplicate content within one site?

And what are the penalties for having duplicate content?

Thanks to all who reply!

 

Hi, anybody? I was hoping to get a little feedback on this one. Thanks!

 

My experience is that duplicate content refers to a page not a site, and the penalty is usually that the page will be listed as a supplemental result

I think you can get away with having a few duplicate pages on a site, if they are well linked in to the rest of a quite well rated site, and have your own title/description/introduction paragraph etc but it's likely to be a battle to get them showing up in the results.

I haven't experimented with how much of a page needs to be duplicate for the penalty to apply

Generally you will do better with 20 pages you have come up with yourself than 200 pages of copied articles.

edit: you would get more responses if this wasn't listed under adsense...

 

Its a percentage probability that the page on your site is the same as a page on another site.

 

You can experiment it using copyscape.com to find out how many duplicate contents you have totally in the web. You search for certain keyword from that article and find out which pages come out at top 10.

 

Well, if you duplicate content that is not allowed to you, you are basically stealing content! That will get you in trouble with copyright issues. But if they tell you the content is free but you have to leave all links and credits on the article, leave it there. I own a article knowledge directory www.knowledger.info I check regularly for people who used my content without adding a link back to my site. I will normally send an email of complaint that they have copied copyrighted content without the authority of the owner, me since they did not follow the TOS. Well, normally they get my warning and just simply take it off or put a backlink.

If they ignore me(although that rarely happens), I send a email to the webhost to report the unallowed material.

 

Thanks to all, this clears things up a bit!