I don't think any of us really know the answer to that because Google is an evolving algorithm. What is true today might not be true tomorrow.

My question is, why risk it? You're putting your entire site in jeopardy over 2-3 posts? Spend some time to rewrite them to make them unique that way you don't have to worry.

If it is only a couple of posts how about contacting the person who wrote them and asking them to guest post on your site? This can bring you some extra traffic and start building a relationship with someone you already admire (if you didn't like what they said you wouldn't have stolen their post)

I would rewrite what you stole first though

Did you get permission to copy those post?

Apparently Google online penalizes you if there's duplicate content within your site. e.g. having two pages with the same content. According to an article syndication article I read here not long ago, it's fine to copy someone else's content and post it on your blog... Although that doesn't seem right at all...

Duplicate content is having the same content more than once on the SAME website. What you are doing is known as syndication and news outlets do it every day of the week. They take news articles from websites and republish them on their own sites.

So long as the majority of content on your blog is unique then you should have no big issues. Google knows that sometimes it makes sense to repost other people's news or opinions -- it happens in the real world too. So they aren't going to penalize you for that.

The only thing you need to worry about when doing this is that you have permission from the content creator to be republishing their content on your website.

I think as long as you have not been complaints, your blog should be no problem.

Yea man you most definitely should get permission first

2 or 3 duplicate articles won't hurt but mid asking why do you need them so badly?

As long as you are giving credit to the original source you shouldn't have any problem with posting content from other blogs, but don't claim it to be your own work.

well, google has a very superior spiders which easily detects if its a duplicate content, It will not penalize your whole website but your post will not get any importance by google bots.

Hi mohsinmallik!

In regards to your question, yes, Google will be able to track down it as a duplicate content. Copy and pasting on-site content will be penalized under the terms of Google. If you steal something, it is highly advisable to rewrite your work.

When it comes to duplicate content, content not produced within your site can be duplicated. It has no bearing as long as the content is not exactly match at your site's page content. Just think about it like a press release which generates thousands of same content.

Even if you can get away with duplicating content from somewhere else on the web, in the end it is going to hurt you. Google is looking for QUALITY content. So while they might not penalize you for h aving duplicated stuff on your site, it is going to be lower quality than your competitors who have taken the time to put some unique, high quality stuff on their site. Lower quality means lower ranking for the most part.

Thanks a lot for all of your thoughts. I have got credited those sites as sources of the articles and also used <blockquote> code within their URL while posting them in my blog.

You're asking the wrong question.

The real questions is, "OMG HOW I FIX!?"

Best change it bro :O

No, I have gone that route before I knew anything about SEO or copyright issues.



Only got to be informed about it when I was contacted by the owners about it, but it was no big deal.

If I were you I would get rid of the articles, then summarise or review them and send links to the site that you got them from. If you are lucky, you may even get a trackback.

If you can, is always good to avoid duplication of content of any kind. Content is kind only when is unique.

A lot of good ideas, the best of all is to invite them to guest blog on your site. They will get interested in your blog and will mention it on their site so more guest bloggers you have the more traffic you will garner. Last year I visited a blog run by an 18 year old Indian student which was PR6 and he achieved high PR and high traffic through hundreds of guest bloggers. His own content made up less than 5% of the blog.