Duplicate Content 2

James where are you??

Look at this the other way. What you're suggesting is that if I go to one of your websites, grab one of your articles, and paste it on my site, Google will drop your page out of the listings and put mine up instead? You must see that this can't possibly be the case - if it was, people would be sniping pages left and right.

You cannot get Google to apply a penalty to someone else's page (or your own page on a different site) by copying their content, even verbatim. The only way you can push them out of the rankings is to rank above them and make them drop down.

Kelvin,
Here I am ...

Look man duplicate content is a myth plain and simple... I do not care if it is posted on your same site, other sites, same server, same ip... It is a MYTH!!!!

This is a proven fact.. Yes I have duplicate content on my sites "same exact content" and no my listings are not hurt. Matter fact I dominate google on many things.

What you need to understand is that google does not want you creating many pages with the exact same content over and over. This means do not create pages that have the same exact article text and nothing else and then naming the pages mykeyword-mykeyword.html , mykeyphrase_mykeyphrase.html and etc.

These are known as doorways pages that many used to use, this is why google implimented the dup penalty... To stop those spammers from spamming the search engines with many dup pages just using different page names.

Duplicate Content itself is a MYTH!!! It does not exist and no google slap and other stupid words people come up with does not exist either, these are proven facts. Sure google changes, sure google may dance your site around, but they do not and I repeat - DO NOT REMOVE YOUR SITE WITHOUT JUST CAUSE!!!

Many many media websites have duplicate content on their sites, maybe you should go read them sometime. They do not hurt in listings at all either.

Seriously I seen no need to start another thread on this junk and I am not being rude but get it through your head.. Realize and understand you are not the only one going for your keywords, if you drop in the ranks, maybe it is because your competition got smart and started building backlinks and doing seo.

James

Hey James...you might want to copy and paste what you just took the time to write in the new thread...Duplicate Content 3...WOW...unreal!

LiLGrace,
Maybe the Mods will get tired of seeing all the "DUPLICATE" threads and start removing them, yes it is unreal....

James

Honestly though, you guys are a little knee-jerky over this stuff. "Duplicate Content" isn't a myth, duh. Copy your content, paste it somewhere else, it's a duplicate. That's not a myth. The duplicate content PENALTY is a myth.

Brian is providing concrete example of situations and trying to figure out what is causing them, but some people just want to lecture and rant and rave about people not listening. If you're not going to be constructive, just let the rest of us have a discussion. Save the rant for people that just post "how do I avoid the duplicate content penalty" threads.

Try copyscape.com to check whether your content is not duplicate or not. That's the only trusted source.

So they aren't identical.

Yeah, the shorter one was deemed more relevant by the search engines, which could be for all kinds of reasons. But you do actually make the point that you should put the content on your own site before you put it anywhere else - it's just as easy to rank highly, and it's more profitable.

Yeah, also, you're talking about a term that I have to think is pursued by other SEOs. If you're talking about a pretty dynamic SERP page for an active keyword, it's going to be really hard to make conclusions without months and months of tracking the results. Not that I do, it's way more trouble than it's worth.

For most people, the scenario you describe would not happen, because most people wouldn't want the directory copy to rank over the one on their own site. So the whole neutering thing might not be relevant.

You made a conclusion, but you're making a pretty huge logical leap. You're taking a real thing (The Google Duplicate Content Penalty), and applying it to something it doesn't refer to (duplicated content across multiple domains), and even within this misapplied definition of the penalty, you're stretching it even further by speculating that it applies when the content isn't even duplicate content?

What?

It most CERTAINLY is a factor. Getting backlinks from pages that rank on the first page for a given term is probably the best way to get fast rankings ever. This is probably more of a factor in the reversible rankings than anything else.

Yeah, you're describing the way that works somewhat correctly, but it's not relevant to what you're talking about. Google wants to show you relevant results. It's a very complicated mathematical guess based on a variety of factors. Here as above, your model is drastically impoverished by not factoring in the necessity of backlinking in how pages will rank.

All kinds of people believe imaginary things are real. It's hard to avoid, we're hardwired to look for patterns and we see them even when there aren't any.

You sure use a lot of meat metaphors. Not relevant, just an observation.

So anyway, your examples don't really prove what you think they do, because they aren't even close to being duplicate by any stretch of the imagination. There are so many factors that go into ranking and believe it or not, the CONTENT actually has very very little to do with it.

It has SOMETHING to do with it, but less than many other factors. Which is why even the mildest of SEO efforts can outrank most article copies that appear in directories.

That flip-flopping effect you're seeing where the one page replaces the other almost certainly has to do with the interlinking between the two, and you're seeing a quirk in the algorithm as far as how Google is trying to determine if one article is the source vs. an excerpt that links to the source.

I bet if you eliminated interlinking between the two sites and SEO'd them both separately, you'd see them both rank on the first page.

Try it and let us know how it works out.

When I did a search for california non-compete agreements, LawZilla was on page one (the page in question) and page two of the Google results... Kindsvater.com was on page 14, and the page in question was on page 38 of the search results

Which suggests to me that there is no duplicate penalty, and kindsvater.com does not have the authority to compete with lawzilla.com for that keyword...