Google penalty for duplicate content?

yeah, not actually a 'penalty'. But publishing loads of identical articles to different sites probably won't help much. Here's a page about why in plain english duplicate content myth

it's a myth promoted by dozens of so-called Gurus, and has sold $1000's worth of ebooks with supposed solutions.

Hi Dave,

It's not totally a myth. People are making a bigger deal of it than necessary.

But just try to set up two almost identical so-called 'Adsense ready' sites (which you can buy anywhere), both with keyword related domain names. For site A you just leave it as it is, without changing the texts. For site B you change the titles of the texts and make some changes in the texts themselves. Let them both run for a month or two. What you'll see, is that site B will come up higher in the SE's and get better Adsense payments.

And that's no coincidence, because SE's love anything that's (made) unique. Which is something different than saying that they simply ban or penalise duplicate content.

Yours, warriorly, Ed

So long as the articles that you publish are slightly different then it is ok. Duplicate content is not good and will have a small negative impact on rankings. Some article sites like EzineArticles won't publish articles that they think are a duplicate of content that is already on the web.

Well I got that green light baby
I got to keep movin on

I would say that they aren't all that sensitive about it.

Do a search on google for "Nokia E71 specs" and you will see

So Where's the Penalty?

It is not a myth purely but it can put your efforts to drain in future, may be.

G is always changing its algo so they might be noticing this thing about same articles being circulated over the web. They might purge the results in future.

G has always taken into account the usefulness of the content to the user.

The other day I was looking for a webcam guide and I ended up reaching the same article on various different article sites that annoyed me a bit.

Like myself, there could be plenty of people got offended by such repeation of content across different websites.

So, it is better to diversify your articles to avoid any future implications from the mighty G

yes there are occurances of duplicate content all over the place. However I have seen some of my pages that have been taken out of the index when they are too similar, same page title same content. I changed the title and they came back in the index

Yes, its a myth. But there is the twist to it. If you have exactly the same website content and start promoting it, the other one will probably will not get as much ranking or traffic compared to the other one. but if you are talking about articles being submitted, you can submit it to thousands ans it will be still okay.

Thanks .... just my 2 cents

Oling

As Intelinside says, Google are always changing their algorithms, but subject to that I believe the "Duplicate Content" issue can be summarised as follows:

1. When you submit an article to an article directory it's liable to be copied and pasted onto thousands of web pages (if it's a good article). Many of those web pages, depending on other factors such as relevancy and so on, will show up near the top of the SERPs. This is good for you as the author of the article as your bio or resource box,
with its link to your sales page, will be at the foot of each article.

2. There may come a point when it's more difficult for webmasters to get their page with your article on it near the top, as by now it's getting crowded, and in any event the search engines' algorithms may downgrade that article's value as it's starting to saturate the results for that keyword phrase. This is bad for people still using your article as content for their site, but it shouldn't matter too much to you as the author of the article as it's generally only the first page or two of the SERPs that bring any results, and they'll still feature several versions of your article.

3. The only way you will probably fall foul of the search engines is if you place exactly the same content on multiple pages of your site. Why anybody would want to do this I can't imagine, but, understandably, the search engines do not favour this. As long as you avoid doing this then you have nothing to worry about over the "duplicate content" issue.

4. If you are using private label rights articles that have been bought by hundreds of other people as well then it's best to take the trouble to alter any that you use slightly right the way through each article, including the title if possible (depending on the search phrase, which keep intact wherever it occurs), so you have a unique article (even if it essentially says the same thing as hundreds of other articles out there). That way you have a better chance of getting your unique article near the top of the SERPs.

5. Fresh content is favoured by the search engines over old content, so whether you're an article writer or a webmaster it's a good idea to write or submit fresh articles on the same keywords on a fairly regular basis.

6. If you're an article writer submitting articles to article directories make sure you submit a unique article to EzineArticles.com, as it's arguably the best article directory and requires content not published elsewhere on the internet. Other article directories are not so stringent in their requirements. You only need submit to the leading article directories as they are the only directories likely to help your article onto the front page of Google. Just make sure the backlink to your site works

This is just my take on the issue and I hope it helps to clarify things for other Warriors.