Duplicate Content

[RCP]

One of the plans I had for the Blogging Painters (http://bloggingpainters.com/) was for painters to learn to blog and move on to their own, but still contribute, and have established bloggers contribute. Some of the latter prefer to post their content on their own blog, and then copy/paste to mine.
Sometimes we strip the local references out if it is an article that another blogger/member might use as an educational tool for a customer. It still sites the original author.
When I first started, I was told that the duplicate content would not be a problem. I did some research and I found a myriad of opinions (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html), some say yes, some no. Generally it seems to be a search result issue, and I think the content is balanced and small enough that it is a non issue, but not sure.

What say you?

[Len]

The duplicate content penalty is a real effect. While there is no actual 'penalty' imposed, the perceived penalty is not showing up in search results.

Now, in theory, this is ideal for the original author of the content. Google will show the original article in the results.

The issue in this example, and one you are likely to see, is when Google shows the copied article and not the original. This effect is usually cause because Google doesn't know where the article originated. It will then guess, and usually give credit to the site with higher authority (PR).

For example, if you posted one of those articles here on RC, there is a good chance it would show RC's page in the results first, because of the higher authority.

So if your site is mostly duplicated content, it likely won't show very high in search results as Google will see it as non-original content and offering little value to users.

There are some ways to help prevent this.

Use noindex (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710&from=61050&rd=1) on duplicated content
Use rel=canonical (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394)
Post excerpts with link to original.


Some important quotes from the page you linked to.

There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you're scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value. These tactics are clearly outlined (and discouraged) in our Webmaster Guidelines:

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

Most search engines strive for a certain level of variety; they want to show you ten different results on a search results page, not ten different URLs that all have the same content. To this end, Google tries to filter out duplicate documents so that users experience less redundancy.

In particular, deciding to build a site whose purpose inherently involves content duplication is something you should think twice about if your business model is going to rely on search traffic, unless you can add a lot of additional value for users.


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[RCP]

Thank you Len, I will study that, appreciate the links and video.

[Wilmington Painter]

Thanks for the explanation Len. Chris and I have talked about this subject in length.

[RCP]

Crap, know you are gonna know I am not smart, just "have people"!

[Wilmington Painter]

Doesn't having people make you smart?

[Wilmington Painter]

Oh and my new thing like I spoke to you earlier today is now building back links. Hmm me thinks it deserves a new topic.

[ewingpainting]

Good topic Chris, I've been wondering the same thing. Great advise len!