Duplicate vs Syndicated Content

^^^^^ This. Exactly.

The two are completely different.

In terms of their location, in SEO terms, in terms of their significance, and all that other stuff.

If it's on different sites, then it isn't "duplicate content" as far as Google is concerned. So don't think of it as "duplicate content" in your own mind, either, because for SEO purposes, and for generally "understanding what you're doing in internet marketing" too, having a conceptual/definition framework that's so out of line with Google's probably isn't really the best starting position.

Of course, there's nothing to stop anyone from being like Humpty Dumpty in Through The Looking Glass, if they want to be like that (“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”) but if you allow yourself to imagine that what's really "syndicated content" is "duplicate content" (just because you "choose to define it that way"), then it's going to draw you into all sorts of confusions, problems and misunderstandings.

And before you know where you are you'll start believing that there's a "duplicate content penalty" for things that aren't even "duplicate content" in the first place, and all sorts of nonsense like this.

I'm not saying that a syndicated article will get you in trouble in the SE's, but there is the possibility of getting it filtered out. If someone picks up an article from a directory, it makes sense to contact that site owner and offer a unique and expanded version of the original article. If can avoid having duplicate content, then you should. And no need to give me YOUR OWN definition of syndicated and duplicate content, Google has their own.....

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=66359

And a tip...

And from Matt Cutts...

Duplicate content question

Ok, from this definition, then do I understand this right? If you submit the same article to different article directories, it is syndicated content? And Google is ok with that? Please correct me if I have it wrong. Thanks:-)

So in your opinion (and Alexa's it seems), in terms of getting backlinks, I'll get the same credit for submitting an unspun article to 200 directories as I would from submitting a highly spun article to the same directories (assuming I get the same percentage of each submissions indexed)?

It'll treat them the same way it usually treats multiple instances of the same (syndicated) content: they'll be filtered out into the supplemental index so as not to allow too many (if any) identical results in the SERPs for any single search-query.

Changing the keywords in each article should obviously, in theory, make them relevant for different search-queries, and may allow them to rank in the main index. But whether that'll work or not remains to be seen and can only be answered by testing.

Either way, the chances are good that you'd still need to build backlinks to those pages to have them rank half-decently, anyway. If you're going to put forth that amount of effort to rank a PLR article, you may as well take a little extra time to rewrite them, thus making them unique and significantly increasing their potential to rank in the main index for other long-tail search-queries, too - ones they otherwise might not have ranked for due to being non-unique, and therefore having to compete head-on for exposure with almost-identical articles across other sites with more SEO authority - no?

In general, the same file found via different urls would be, technically, duplicate content. For example:

both lead to the same page, the home page of the site. But since they have different addresses, they could be considered duplicate content.

Google has a way, via webmaster tools, to tell them which is the "real" home page and which they can safely ignore. That's why people will tell you to pick one linking scheme (with or without the www) and stick to it.

Blogs may be a special case. You can use special codes to tell Google which copy you consider the most important one. You can also use either an SEO plugin or robots.txt file to tell the spider which addresses to look at and which ones to ignore.

That said, I believe they're familiar enough with how blog platforms work that they won't penalize you for something the software does automatically. They simply might not choose the same url as you would to consider as the 'real' one.

Thanks, Marvin. I forgot all abut using the .htaccess file. I've been doing essentially the same thing through the domain registrar's control panel for years.

I think we can all pretty much agree that seeing the same article, or other piece of content, dominating the front page of the search results is undesirable. At least from Google's point of view.

So when the spiders and bots do their thing, and the black box determines that when a certain query is run, which would put the same article on the front page multiple times, the black box will pick one of those copies to display.

The duplicate content filter is the algorithm which determines which copy to display. While the actual factors and weightings are a secret, some of the factors are believed to be the original date of indexing, the authority and trust of the site containing the copy, the number and type of links to the copy, the authority and trust of the lining site, and so on in a 'drop a rock in a pond and watch the expanding rings' kind of progression.

Some believe geography plays a role in which copy you see. If so, a searcher in the UK and one in the USA might see the same article pop up for a search, but the UK searcher would see a copy on a UK site and the US searcher on a US site.

While I might quibble with the notion that the content packages you describe are actually syndicated content as opposed to some type of PLR, the effect is close enough for this discussion.

The sites and pages you get from your membership are not duplicate content as Google uses the term, and they would be treated as individual pages for determining search position.

It depends on what you mean by "change the keywords." If you mean simply changing the meta keyword list in the header, then you really haven't changed a significant portion of the page.

On the other hand, if you went through and changed "toy train" to "model railroad" on a page, you would very likely pull traffic for different keywords.

The people who change nothing all take their chances on the duplicate content filter I described above. Note, I said filter, not penalty.


You should be able to affect your home page's ranking by rewriting the home page, without rewriting a single sentence of the other pages.

Look at the oft-cited example of the major news sites. Most of them are filled with pages containing identical articles published in many other places.


Only time will tell for sure, but that looks like a likely outcome.

SEO-related duplicate content issues (i.e., penalisation of your site in the SERPs) usually only arise if the content duplicated has been done so across multiple pages of the same site, and in such a way as to give Google reason to judge it as an attempt to game their search-results in ways that are in violation of their accepted practices. In (most) other cases, all that happens is that it's filtered out of the SERPs.

Content duplicated (or "syndicated", rather) across multiple sites - whether legitimately (with the original author's/owner's consent) or otherwise - doesn't usually pose any risk of "duplicate content issues" arising from an SEO perspective, in the sense that your own site's good standing and ranking positions in the SERPs will not be negatively impacted.

It might pose a problem in the sense that if it's illegitimately copied, it's plagiarism / copyright infringement, but that's a different matter entirely (and not something you'd usually label a "duplicate content issue", but rather an issue of legality).