Duplicate Content - Does it Really Matter?

Their is no question that duplicate content plays
a HUGE role in website rankings. Those that say it
does not play a part are spoon feeding you lies.

Best,

Duplicate content will get your penalized with Google and they will drop you in the SERPS unless......you give credit where credit is due. You must include the source of where you recieved that info in order to prevent creating or trying to pass off content as your own.

If your smart you will write your own quality info for both the search engines and readers alike.

Here is a re-post of a post I made which goes into more detail about this subject.

The History of Duplicate Content.

Back in the early days of SEO up until around 1997/98 (Google) you could have a page about making money online and your title would be How To Make Money Online the heading would be the same. The first paragraph would start off with this too and so on.

One day, someone figured out that you could have an entire page with nothing but make money online, make money online...just like meta keywords.

That didn't look very good to the human eye so the trick was to have an article for the human reader and under the table that held your article would be very long list of your keywords repeated over and over again but this time the keywords text would be the same color as the background.

Invisible to the naked eye and the little search bots didn't have a clue so you could do this and be number one at anything.

Then the invisible keyword text wars began. It was horrible. Every page you went to had a table with an article and about 3 pages long invisible text.

The images all had these long "alt" tags that were nothing more than an entire string of keywords. It all started looking so bad that "doorway pages" were created to hold enough keywords to put War and Peace to shame with a redirect to the "real" page.

One of the first "smart bots", Inktomi at HotBot realized that the only way to deal with this problem was to incorporate some sort of way to recognize unnecessary duplicate content.

They started coming up with counting programs and formulas for determining meaningful content.

The first thing they did was to drop your site if you had an unrealistic number of the same words over and over. Then they went to work on invisible text.

Meanwhile, across town, a couple of fellas took this idea and ran with it and Google was born.

Matt

Here is just a quick little test.

Dave Barry is a syndicated columnist writer and here is one of his article titles.

Type this into Google

Feeling Sick? Blame Your Computer

The exact article comes up over and over and again.

The sites that have those articles start ranking on the overall site's ability to satisfy the search terms not how many times the article is listed on Google's pages.

If Google had a way to determine which individual articles were the most relevant, it would most certainly be the original newspaper article that Dave wrote for the paper he worked for. But as you can see, this is not the case.

However, if the paper that Dave worked for had repeated his original article over and over again they would be "penalized" (marks against them in the ranking process) for having "duplicate content" (keyword stuffing) on their site.

Obviously, Google does not count the number of times that a keyword is found throughout the web. It is concerned with the amount of times it is found on individual pages and sites.

Matt

James? Oh, James, where are you? You must be on Holiday for the New Years. You usually bust down the "Duplicate Content" questions within 2 minutes!!

In a nutshell:
Duplicate Content within the same site is bad.

On different sites, not bad.

End of story. There are plenty of threads already on this forum that will go into details and provide all the proof you need. (Not just opinions, but proof)

Im too young to remember the invisible text wars, but duplicate content does not help. Why do you think affiliate programs with the exact same capture page have such a hard time? The only one getting the traffic is the main page or someone who advertises the heck out of their page to try, and get above the original. So yes original content is good, and duplicate is bad.

It matters if that's all you have on your site. If it is mixed with your unique content it might still matter, but a lot less. I still get traffic to my autoblogs which consist of duplicate content but the traffic would be a ton higher if each article was unique.

I've created sites exclusively with duplicate content and achieved high rankings in Google with those sites.

I'm not suggesting you go out and create a duplicate content site just because it may be easy. You should evaluate your goals for the site first, and if you find already published content that helps you achieve those goals, then go for it.

John

Duplicate content only causes a penalty if you have duplicate pages on your own site. For example, if www. yourdomain.com/topic1 has the same content as www. yourdomain.com/topic2 you may get penalized in the SERP's.

If you have an article posted on your site, and then submit the exact same article to article directories you will not get a penalty. The SERPs are looking to penalize sites that post the same content over and over again on one site.

If sites did get penalized for having dublicate content, every news agency in the United States would have highly penalized websites. All of them post the same articles from the Associated Press every single day.

Damnit, I was typing too slow...

There have been a lot of controversy over duplicate content and a lot of people hold different views. Truth is, duplicate content do not really harm your site, except you will hardly get a back link from a duplicate content. The link that you might not be building is what actually makes your site to drop off the serp.

Think about this, you competitors can easily use a duplicate content against you. The search engines aren't that daft.

Original content gives you back links while duplicate content do not.

Most SEO experts don't know that people in the New Age niche respond well to the color purple on a site design. Or that medical pages should be using blues and greens.

People in San Francisco don't respond very well to "hype" headlines.

If you include an American Flag or those colors on your page that people in the Mid West "Red States" you get a higher conversion rate.

If I am working on a "dog" site I will talk about getting bit and should know what to do about it.

SEO experts don't know how to "name drop" within a niche. They don't know who is passe' and who is the Hot author even though Amazon doesn't confirm it.

My point is that regardless of what the stats and books and even what Google says about what works and what doesn't that it isn't always the case.

I have gone into niches that Google didn't even know existed and all of the top keyword software said there was no traffic and have been able to get hundreds of uniques per day.

So software that costs hundreds of dollars and almighty Google says there is nobody home and yet I can build an authority site that pulls like crazy.

Sorry for the rant but I have heard so much bullsh*t float around this place for so long that I think I'm done with it.

Matt

One thing I will agree with, never listen to a so-called expert.. instead go out and test it for yourself ...

James

Okay I have a further question about dupe content - on my wordpress installation I accidently got a backlink with an extra ) at the end. Wordpress shows the same page not a 404 error.

So there are now 2 articles indexed:

myblog*com/my-article
myblog*com/my-article)

Both of course with the same content?

Will this hurt me?

If so could I do this on purpose to my competitors to hurt them ... hypothetically?

Guys, thanks for all the good insight. I guess you can't go wrong if you can use unique content whenever possible, but from what I am hearing, the same content posted on multiple sites is not considered duplicate content ... duplicate content refers to the same content appearing multiple times within the same site. Is this correct?

And as far as ranking, backlinks are the most important factor?