What is the down side of using the same content for 2 or 3 sites?

[BradRich]

I have several domain names I bought to build guitar sites on. I thought I would build several sites in the guitar niche since I play guitar and know about it. 2 of them are in progress now. It seems to take me a long time to write good content, so could I just use the same content on these sites or will that cause problems.

[orvn]

Originally Posted by BradRich

I have several domain names I bought to build guitar sites on. I thought I would build several sites in the guitar niche since I play guitar and know about it. 2 of them are in progress now. It seems to take me a long time to write good content, so could I just use the same content on these sites or will that cause problems.

Some people syndicate their content, I don't.
Original content carries more weight. Some believe that the first place your content was posted is the most powerful.

Don't duplicate your content under the same domain though.

[BaloneyTony]

Do NOT use the same content if search engine rankings are important to you. Google is very good at spotting duplicate content and it is highly likely that all of your sites will be penalized. Write new content for each site, or if you aren't as concerned with quality, you can always spin your content to at least 70% uniqueness.

[orvn]

Originally Posted by BaloneyTony

Do NOT use the same content if search engine rankings are important to you. Google is very good at spotting duplicate content and it is highly likely that all of your sites will be penalized. Write new content for each site, or if you aren't as concerned with quality, you can always spin your content to at least 70% uniqueness.

I don't mean to seem harsh, but this is not true. There is no penalty, although the original piece of content will likely be more powerful.

Using the same content across multiple sites is called syndication.
Duplication is using the same content across the same site, and should be remedied with proper use of the canonical element.

This myth is often perpetuated by those who take the word duplication in its literal meaning.

[BaloneyTony]

Originally Posted by orvn

I don't mean to seem harsh, but this is not true. There is no penalty, although the original piece of content will likely be more powerful.

Using the same content across multiple sites is called syndication.
Duplication is using the same content across the same site, and should be remedied with proper use of the canonical element.

This myth is often perpetuated by those who take the word duplication in its literal meaning.

Whatever you call it, it has definitely lead to a decrease in rankings in my experience. I've had competitors steal my content and repost on several sites, resulting in a drop in rankings for my pages. As soon as this content was removed my rankings jumped back up.

I am not sure if you are speaking from experience or just theoretically, but content syndication as you call it has personally caused me problems in the past.

[orvn]

Well, that's unusual, because if that's the case, I could leech content off all my competitors and post it on various article directories on the internet, (linking back to me instead) and then experience a rise in my rankings because I damaged my competitors.

No. This isn't how it works

My information comes from my experience and the agreement of most of the senior Warriors on this forum, as well theory (similarity, recall and chronology matching within the Hilltop Algorithm).

This has been discussed on this forum a number of times.

It's generally agreed that no offpage SEO can harm your ranking.
Think about it.
If I could do damage to your site's ranking without accessing it's code, attacking other competing sites would be a major part of SEO strategy in the black hat world.

I cannot explain your incident, however.

YouTube - SMX Seattle: Matt Cutts on...

[LarryHaywood]

Originally Posted by BradRich

I have several domain names I bought to build guitar sites on. I thought I would build several sites in the guitar niche since I play guitar and know about it. 2 of them are in progress now. It seems to take me a long time to write good content, so could I just use the same content on these sites or will that cause problems.

Probably better if you have unique content on each site. However, you can use your article on your other sites if you wish or even find a few articles from some of the article directories to give you a little content to fill in for now. Syndicated content is better than no content.

[davidmeeonline]

It's probably better to focus on one site to get the best results, but setting a few up may be good to see what format works best, and gets the most visitors.

At some stage though, it may be better to really focus on building up one site, and making in an authority.

Cheers

[Dan B Rusu]

At one point I was using duplicate content to try and get about 50 niche sites ranking. They all failed miserably - no matter what I did. Lesson learned.

Some people have had success with duplicate content on autoblogs - but I think they had to spin the content alot and can only rank for very long tail keywords.

[MikeFriedman]

Originally Posted by BaloneyTony

Do NOT use the same content if search engine rankings are important to you. Google is very good at spotting duplicate content and it is highly likely that all of your sites will be penalized. Write new content for each site, or if you aren't as concerned with quality, you can always spin your content to at least 70% uniqueness.

Absolute rubbish.

If Google penalized people like this, IM would be a warzone. We would all be posting eachother's content all over the place to try harm eachother's sites and get better rankings for our own sites.

Another thing. If there was ANY truth to this, a site like Ezine Articles would cease to exist immediately. Nobody would want to post their content there.

There is no harm in using the same content on different sites. I do it all the time. Just do not use the same content on the same domain.

[Dan B Rusu]

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

Absolute rubbish.

If Google penalized people like this, IM would be a warzone. We would all be posting eachother's content all over the place to try harm eachother's sites and get better rankings for our own sites.

Another thing. If there was ANY truth to this, a site like Ezine Articles would cease to exist immediately. Nobody would want to post their content there.

There is no harm in using the same content on different sites. I do it all the time. Just do not use the same content on the same domain.

It's not the original creator of the content that is penalized, it's the person that steals it.

That's why Ezine doesn't accept duplicate content.

I've had sites that I couldn't get anywhere with because they had duplicate content, all free content, taken from another site.

A good experiment would be to build a site and get it ranking. Then build another site, with the exact same content and see if you can get it ranking with the same backlinks.

[healthstatus]

It is a no-no for your money site. If you have linkwheels, or multiple blogs (on different ip addresses) that point to your money site it shouldn't be a problem. Consider the success of submitting press releases and getting the exact same content spread out over the Internet all pointing back to your money site.

[jhonsean]

Duplication is always duplication there is no such things as you benefit in this kind of process maybe yes but in a short duration.

[JunkYour925]

I agree with MikeFriedman. The Google Propaganda machine truly is effective and alive regarding "duplicate content." I still spin my offpage content but I don't knock myself out. I've seen plenty of EXACT offpage copies out there from other IMers with backlinks that are still being recognized and counted by the SE's

[GeraldGigerl]

Originally Posted by BradRich

I have several domain names I bought to build guitar sites on. I thought I would build several sites in the guitar niche since I play guitar and know about it. 2 of them are in progress now. It seems to take me a long time to write good content, so could I just use the same content on these sites or will that cause problems.

Hey,

I´d suggest against using the same content because Google´s spider will see it as "duplicated" content and it won´t rank or appear on Google. But what you can do is to spin your article so that they are at least 30-40% unique (the closer you get to 40 the better it is for you).

[paulgl]

Who knows who the original owner is? Google sure doesn't.

EZA does not care. They only want you to swear that you are the owner.
But we know how that works.

I had to laugh, however, in reading the title of this thread:

What is the down side of using the same content for 2 or 3 sites?

I'm having a hard time coming up with any upside!

Paul

[Carol_A]

Wow, a lot of food for thought as a newbie. My blog has only been up about two months. Was going to try this, but not sure now.

[bigK]

According to the latest AdSense blog you are not allowed to have AdSense on sites that are made of duplicate content.

[JunkYour925]

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

Absolute rubbish.

If Google penalized people like this, IM would be a warzone. We would all be posting eachother's content all over the place to try harm eachother's sites and get better rankings for our own sites.

Another thing. If there was ANY truth to this, a site like Ezine Articles would cease to exist immediately. Nobody would want to post their content there.

There is no harm in using the same content on different sites. I do it all the time. Just do not use the same content on the same domain.

exactly....and not only that but no one would publicize their site's RSS feed.

duplicate off-site pages with backlinks to your site will either help or not, but they won't PENALIZE you.

[MikeFriedman]

Originally Posted by Daniel7rusu

It's not the original creator of the content that is penalized, it's the person that steals it.

That's why Ezine doesn't accept duplicate content.

I've had sites that I couldn't get anywhere with because they had duplicate content, all free content, taken from another site.

A good experiment would be to build a site and get it ranking. Then build another site, with the exact same content and see if you can get it ranking with the same backlinks.

Sorry, but this just isn't true either.

I have several sites, with #1 rankings in Google, and the only content on those sites other than ads and an email signup form are articles I have taken straight from Ezine. I was in a pinch to write my own stuff and in the meantime just used those articles.

I do this all the time.

The ONLY duplicate content penalty that exists is if you have the same content multiple times on the same domain. That's it. End of story. If you put the same article on six different pages on your site, that's a problem. If the same article is on sixteen different pages, no problems. In fact, I have multiple cases of the same article on different sites showing up 10, 15, 20, or even more times in the top 100 of the SERP's.