Myths About Duplicate Content

[CheapTrafficDude]

I'm pretty sure everyone or most are familiar with the duplicate content myths... Of course this bring innovations and strategies to fight this "fact". You have article spinners to re-write articles and copyscape to check against duplicate content. However, something just doesn't seem to make sense in my mind about all this... If an article is on thousands of websites, doesn't it make the content "popular"?

A wise man (Daniel Tan I believe) once told me and I quote out of memory, "Press releases differ from regular articles as they are distributed within news related websites, it's the nature of press releases and the more your press releases are distributed, the more popular it is and the more news sites find it news-worthy. That's the beauty of press releases, you don't need spinners and the more the same pres release is used, the better it is."

I agree with the above but wouldn't the same rule apply to articles? Is the above statement even true? Did the farmer update affect press release websites? Are article spinners just a marketing coup to prey on the fear of duplicate content? Did anyone ever lose ranking because their articles were the same as others?

For example, write one article and submit it to 100's of directories and websites... I don't see anyone doing this anymore, everyone is bent on duplicate content... Now, some say it's a 100% myth and some say it's total reality. I guess those promoting article submission tools or services say it's a myth and those promoting spinners say it's a reality?

Kinda hard to actually find someone to believe...

Thanks in advance,
Chuck

[rahmanpaidar]

That's a real myth. I remember a case where the stolen content was in higher search results than the original. Seems google doesn't care much as there is no simple proof which is original

[blueboy9]

Opinions on this vary widely, mostly due to different interpretations of Google's algorithm guy, Matt Cutts. Blog posts like this indicate such a penalty exists, but then there's a video interview with him where he says average users don't need to worry about it.

Re-writing your PLR or creating your own unique content is generally looked upon as the safest way to gain search engine love both in the short term and the long term.

[markowe]

Chuck, I think you may be onto something! Why not test and see what really happens! I would say more, but I would rather my competitors spent all their time spin-spin-spinning Let's just say I have been taking exactly the approach you are talking about for the last few months and so far results are encouraging.

[paulgl]

The myths about duplicate content are that people see duplicate
content and get all buggy eyed and cower in the corner.

Nothing could be further form the truth.

Copied content tossed on a site for no reason other than to just
have content that provides no valuable and/or unique visitor
experience is what google warns you about.

Every major news website has the same scraped AP or Reueters
news stories. And they auto-publish it. The logic of articles is
the same thing. Why would article sites BEG you to republish
articles? To toss both you and them in the sewer? Sure....

Google also warns you about real duplicate content. Content
duplicated across many pages to run the gamut on search
engine traffic.

Nothing could be further from the truth when people claim
that just using duplicate content will get you some penalty.

It's all about how you use copied and duplicate content.

Google's panda and warnings are to weed out those that wish
to toss together crappy junky sites that have no business cluttering
up their search results, with sites that are peddling nothing and
have no real business on the net except to con people into a scam
or clicking an ad. Yes, that includes stuffing a site with nothing
but a ton of EZA articles. But there is a way to use EZA effectively.

I'm surprised this thread is not filled with dozens of cargo-posters
telling you how duplicate content is bad and the big bad google will
blow your house down if you use it.

Paul

[orvn]

Well, that's syndicated content.

[The SEO Guy]

Even if this is a myth to get penalized, surely spinning content would be good practice anyway as when crawled by the bots they would see it as articles written by different people and look like the word about your site is getting round. I hope that makes sense

[markowe]

Originally Posted by The SEO Guy

Even if this is a myth to get penalized, surely spinning content would be good practice anyway as when crawled by the bots they would see it as articles written by different people and look like the word about your site is getting round. I hope that makes sense

You might have a point there. Only way is to know is to test, really. I just think the whole spinning thing seems to be more based on "common wisdom" than anything else, I don't know of anyone who has actually done comparison tests (I should read the BH forums more I guess!). I hate spinning - it's BORING and time-consuming, if you want to do it properly. And if you don't want to do it properly, you end up filling the Internet with junk, which I don't really want. So, if I can avoid spinning I will, it makes sense to me.

[boxoun]

Article directories want fresh content so they dont get slapped. Yes, we dont care because we have the fresh copy on our site but why would any respectable directory want to have useless content? Yes, sometimes crap out ranks yours but I think thats just an anomaly.

[azmanar]

Originally Posted by paulgl

It's all about how you use copied and duplicate content.

Google's panda and warnings are to weed out those that wish
to toss together crappy junky sites that have no business cluttering
up their search results, with sites that are peddling nothing and
have no real business on the net except to con people into a scam
or clicking an ad. Yes, that includes stuffing a site with nothing
but a ton of EZA articles. But there is a way to use EZA effectively.

Paul

Hi,

I'm with Paul about the duplicate content issue.

This issue has been raised time and again in WF.

Another example other than Press Media is RSS.

Why do RSS brings great traffic, if duplicate content is an issue?

The real crap is taking content from Article Directories and reuse
them in hundreds of websites with no value but for junk backlinking.

I know a few people who use hundreds of domains and sub domains
to clutter the internet with exactly the same content.

When they got penalized by Google, they complained a lot.

[seoforu]

The popularity of the website is the most important thing.If you are able to insert a duplicate content in a popular site then there are chances that it may rank well in SERPS.