Is the "duplicate content myth" still a myth?

[JamesM]

Unless you've been hidden under a rock then you know all about the farmer/panda Google algo updates. I used to rank using dupe content without any problems, so I was always confident that duplicate content "penalties" were a myth.

However, the last couple of months I've lost some rankings and they all seem to be for dupe content pages (that is content that's duplicated on other domains, not internally). Only one of my original content pages has disappeared, but I think that's Google dancing because I've been dropping some pretty heavy backlinks on it.

My sites as a whole have obviously not been affected (in that the presence of dupe content with dropped rankings hasn't negatively impacted my original content pages), and this further reinforces the fact that Google ranks *pages* and not *sites*.

Any thoughts? Has anybody with sites containing a mixture of original and dupe content seen a similar pattern?

I'm thinking that I might do an audit of dupe pages that were previously performing well and put together some original content for them instead. Hopefully rankings will return, plus it would be a solid indication of the effect of original vs duplicate content...

[NastyBlast]

with the amount of mass content spamming that has been going on for the last few years I would say that content in general is at risk( original or not). Newsfeeds, article feeds and all the other spam driven content is quite literally out of control at this point. Automated programs are just pumping Google full of crap every day for years now.

I think Google will start having to rely on its feedback channels( how many clicks and visits to a site and on-site metrics ) to determine the rank from now on. There is always a new horizon on search and I'd say we are at the dawn of a new one.

back when RSS feeds press releases and articles became popular a few years ago the idea never made that much sense to me. News is one thing, spam is another. So how do you tell the news from the spam. I think for a while Google just had to let it ride until it got a solution and that solution has now arrived as panda. People that got addicted to promoting their websites through mass media feeds are now seeing their sites take a nosedive off the abyss of spam.

I think that websites that keep content to themselves would be the next logical step in Google judgment of content. After you've been watching Google for a while it's not all that hard to figure out. Google is really just a portal for users to find you through not an entity to be pleased as so many people start to do. By flooding the portal the entire Internet has repeated what had happened with e-mail. Eventually the media became useless without extreme spam filters.

So it's no surprise that Google is going through the same thing with mass spam of content to the extent that it cannot tell who the original creator is or if the content is unique. people may have to back off their RSS feeds and keep their articles to themselves