Hi, I recently started using articles from an "article site", to add content to my site at www.WorldwideInfoSource.com . 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!
Google themselves explined Duplicate Content well recently. Subscribe to their blog's RRS, highly recommended. Copying articles will defo trigger dupe content, it's one of the worst forms of duplicate content there is. And no, just because your template is different doesn't make it good enough content to be included in the index.
Spiders parse the content from the page script. A duplicate of any article content is still duplicate content. A page with an article from another site is very likely to get tossed into supplemental results. The reason is simple. Search engines do not want 20 copies of the same article to show up in the top 20 slots. The only ways that I've seen to bypass a duplicate content penalty is either have a very high PageRank site (like most major news sites with syndicated articles) or to have a lot of backlinks pointing to the duplicate content page.
Thank you both. What if I modify the articles, adding and removing some stuff, rearranging and putting some things in my own words? Is there some kind of threshold that Google looks for?
That's still duplicate content. Do the web a favour and make real content instead. There is no quick way to creating a top class site that earns good money so write your own or pay for good, unique content.
I see. One more question. Will a page that has duplicate content be penalized, or the entire site? I am wondering if I should take down the articles while I write my own, or leave them there for my existing site members to read. I would like to leave them, because they do generate clicks on my Adsense Ads that are on the same pages.
duplicate content is more of a filter not a penalty....the pages that have duplicate content will end up supplemental and they won't rank for any decent keywords..... don't take them down until you have the content to replace them Duplicate Content Issues
Correct. They won't hurt you but they won't benefit you either. So there's little point. Ideally block them from robots.txt so it saves Google the bandwidth whilst still showing them to your visitors.
I would just keep adding unique content and don't care about the old stuff.. ... leave it as it is (unless you have thousands of pages)....
lol, I just read that and came here to post the link. gonna change my name to "beaten to the punch" Good article. Lisa
Well you could try this http://www.copyscape.com/ and see if it shows duplicate content. May i suggest that if your not the best at writing articles that you NOT copy word for word and that you mix it up some as this will excuse you from copying content. In other words just use the article for refrence in your own article. thx malcolm
One thing I wonder is, if you are an authoritive site on the topic then perhaps google get these things wrong. I have heard complaints from people who sent out articles and then ranked lower than somw of the publishing sites for those articles. ? Notting
I have a current events blog. I never copy and paste stories. I read up on a story on 2 or 3 sites and then write them up in my own words and yet Googlebrat consistently slaps my pages into the supplemental bin. This is yet another reason why I no longer even bother to follow Googlebrat's idiotic SEO guidelines. There are enough other search engines out there to make worrying about Googlebrat pointless IMHO.
You'll hear arguments on both sides of the duplicate content "penalties". Some say they exist, others say it doesn't. Regardless, I've seen sites (and have a few myself) that are made up of 100% RSS feeds of full articles at the top of the engines for BIG keywords. The rumor is good though, it does stop people from duplicating content and makes the internet more useful.