Duplicate content and google

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1. Is it possible that if my article (on my website) gets indexed in google, and then another 50 guys steal that same article from my website and put it onto their website....am i right in saying that google will not penalise me because they can see i was the original content holder based on the date/time that they indexed my orgical article on my website?

2. If google hates duplicate content, why will they still index copies of my article on the websites of thieves who stole them?

3. When i post an article up on my website (I do this every few days to get google to crawl my site often), i also post this same article to a few article directories to create back links. I have heard this is not ideal as it is duplicate content, however google still index's the articles i submit to the directories. Should I continue doing this or not? the way i see it is that i have nothing to lose, as long as i wait for the original article on my website to be indexed website first before sending it to 1001 article directories. The only thing I will gain is backlink if google DOES index the duplicate articles and my website wont be penalized as it is seen as the original content writer as it was index first out of all the rest.
#search engine optimization #content #duplicate #google
  • My understanding is that as long as you were first you are fine. Maybe the first 5 copies or so Google will tolerate but the rest they will ignore.

    When submitting articles you may want to just alter them a little bit. You will still have the keywords and the backlinks. Ezine will penalize you if they find that you are just posting duplicate content, even if it is your own.

    Chances are you may be ok that way but to change up the content a little bit is quick and easy and will probably be better for you in the long run.
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    • [2] replies
    • Ok - just to put any minds at ease...

      Duplicate content is nasty - but only if it's on your site.

      If anyone else says, different, ignore them.

      Lets think about it logically - say I'm your competitor and I want you out of my way. How would I do it?

      1) I would get a load of nasty neighbourhoods to link to you with 1,000's of links

      2) I would take all your content and duplicate it all over the place

      Now, the above two examples were fake. There is no way search engines would allow such underhand tactics to affect their SERPS.

      Yes - the more duplicates out there, the less attention the search engine pays to them but they still index them, and in turn follow your link and in turn pass on page rank.

      I would say what you are doing is fine - so don't worry about that. It's the cleanest way of distributing your content - for instance putting it on your site first and getting it indexed etc.

      I would say - to get most traction out of it, try and alter the articles to make the search engines pay more attention to them.

      Keep plugging away - you're doing great.
      • [ 2 ] Thanks
    • Thanks all!
      • [1] reply
  • TheHutz is correct. Even Matt Cutts said this did not matter to Google except on the same site. And I'm not even sure it matters to Google that much. Look at the social sites. They are full of duplicate content and they rank very well.
  • Strangely enough - Duplicate content can sometimes work in your favour. If you use 'printable' text as described by the author of a work of text and cross link it based on relevance of material, then Google may actually see it as being endorsed by an older site and lift both sites within SERP. But apart from that follow The Hutz's advice.
    Always look for 'printable' versions.
    • [1] reply
    • Remember, if you use the duplicate material on your Blog or Website but change the keywords within that duplicate content Google looks at it as original . And subsequently will rank you based on those specific keywords which is different than the original piece which was ranked for other keywords.
  • TheHutz - Excellent summary. Google doesn't want webmasters to be able to sabotage their competition so they can't penalize duplicate content, unless, as you stated, it is duplicated on your own site.
    • [1] reply
    • Discrat, your posting brings to mind a question Ive had for a while now...when you say 'changing the keywords' I assume you are talking about the keywords peppered through out the article rather than the actual achor text of the back links themselves.

      My question...as we know the most significant in terms of keyword 'recognition' for google is the actual anchor text of the back link....now how important is it that that same keyword exists in the article content itself? Obviously if you had a back link with anchor text 'breeding dogs' pointing to your site but the content of the article itself was on the topic of space exploration, would this de-value the back link? I guess what Im asking is how important is it and how much does it count that you have your keyword within the content AS WELL AS the anchor text of your back link.
      • [1] reply
  • Maybe the bot will punish your site with the duplicate penalty as these article directory sites have much more trust (PageRank)! Perhaps, they look at this metric before they look at the time and date of the article.
  • I am not an expert on this topic but I do a lot of reading. I think it was Andrew Hansen who mentioned that only duplicate content on your site is a problem. He experimented on promoting an article he got from another site and it ranked higher than the same article printed on other sites/blogs.

    I'm a bit worried though. WebProNews says it's only a matter of time before Google finds a way to clamp down on duplicate content across other sites. Of course, this is only their theory.
    • [1] reply
    • It's highly unlikely because this would hurt news sites that syndicate news feeds ranging from local newspaper to TV sites to big news sites like CNN, MSNBC and ESPN.
      • [1] reply
  • Just an official google webmaster cherry on top of it:

    Thanks for the constructive discussion here, folks, it's an honor to be with you
    • [1] reply
    • Thanks for that Smokey - forgot to mention that just because you have dupe content on you're site, you're not gonna die a horrible death - as long as it's not full of spammy techniques

      Thanks for pointing that out.
  • Happy to be of some use here
  • What others have said is absolutely right.

    You won't receive penalties just because you have duplicate content from other websites, but you won't necessarily gain any rankings either. The greater concern is whether you have duplicate content on your own website, and like Dale said, that's not something to fret about unless you're doing something deceptive on purpose.

    Just think of all the large ecommerce sites with thousands of pages (such as Amazon) that contain identical text in the header, footer and the sidebar on every single page. They're not exactly deindexed, or failing to rank for their terms, so of course Google takes many things into consideration.

    One last point I'd add, is that the "original owner" (if Google even looks at it like that) is often the site with the highest Trust Rank, which can very often be determined by its Page Rank. This is why you'll see duplicate articles on sites such as Ezine, Squidoo and Hubpages ranking higher than other sites. They have that Google trust, and Page Rank.

    Now that we've got the "science" of SEO out of the way, I'll tell you more practically that duplicate content isn't an issue if you own the rights to the original article. If you own the copyright to the original content (which you do if you created it and didn't give anyone permission to reuse it) and another site is outranking you with your own content, then simply sending a Cease & Desist notice to the hosting company of said website (found out through a Whois), with a CC of the notice to the offending website owner, will usually result in the content being taken down by one of the two.

    So practically, this isn't really an issue for your own content, as any scraping sites that fail to give you the backlink, you can just report if they become too much of an issue.
  • Good Thread Guys. I had problem with ezinearticle recently. I posted my article at articlebase. Then posted the same article at ezine which did not go thru due to duplicate content. Rewrote the article twice and it still says duplicate content. I just got fed up with ezine. Please advice ?

    Thanks.
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
  • youll not get sandboxed IF your site(content(s)) is older than the duplicated ones..still that depends on site age
  • That's clarified things in my mind......I won't duplicate content. Thanks all.
    • [1] reply
    • TheHutz,

      on your previous posting...

      1. So in a nut shell it seems that as long as you make sure you get your content indexed FIRST, then google will see you as the originator and will tend to ignore any other versions of your content elsewhere on the web (even though alot of it will be indexed but maybe not as well). I mean publishers re-publish EA articles (as long as they keep back links in tact) and they manage to get indexed by google.

      So if its a fine strategy to post my article to my website, get it indexed FIRST before anyone else, and then distribute that same article on MAN (My Article Network)...why are blog/site owners on MAN reluctant to accept your article if its not spun? (MAN provides that spinning capability while submitting an article). I mean if duplicate content still gets ranked and there is really no prob with it then why would a blog owner reject it purely because they can see youre not spinning that particular article. Is it because the site owner knows that the same article is going out to plenty other site owners and he stands less chance of google actually indexing the version on his site/blog? where as if it were unique and he knew he was getting a unique/spun copy from you each time, he knows that google would most certainly index it as no-one else has it yet.

      2. Another question which may be a grey area...at what point does google STOP indexing particular content...the first originator will almost always get indexed right, maybe the second copy and maybe the third too...but when does google start ignoring that content completely? (guess there isnt a specific time period here but any comments would do.)

      Dale
  • even I hate this part
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    Duplicate content and google

    1. Is it possible that if my article (on my website) gets indexed in google, and then another 50 guys steal that same article from my website and put it onto their website....am i right in saying that google will not penalise me because they can see i was the original content holder based on the date/time that they indexed my orgical article on my website? 2. If google hates duplicate content, why will they still index copies of my article on the websites of thieves who stole them?