SEO Tycoon

**Kirtan** · 03-15-2007, 10:26 PM

I know, chrishirst, said so many times there is no duplicate content penalty and also he gave link to google web master help center info about it.

Recently Jill Whalen of High Rankings wrote a article about this..
http://searchengineland.com/070315-100022.php
In that he generally says and agrees with chirishirst.

But, Halfdeck of seo4fun saying..
http://www.seo4fun.com/blog/2007/01/...t-penalty.html
He said he tested and there is duplicate content penalty.

So, what is the truth about duplicate content

**ADAM Web Design** · 03-15-2007, 10:39 PM

Look at it this way...if you're that worried about this issue, you're not worried about the more important issues associated with your site (such as creating original content that wouldn't hit a real or imagined duplicate filter in the first place.)

**ForrestCroce** · 03-15-2007, 11:12 PM

I have to agree with Adam. There may or may not be an official penalty, and it's surely something we can learn through testing ... but there's no limit to the number of things we can learn. Did you know a tree in south-east Asia has as many species of insects on average as the entire US? Does knowing that fact help your web site prosper? Not really, but to me it's more important than where there's really a penalty. I have some photos from Montana, where they have horse flies that bite and draw blood.

Non-duplicate ( ie original ) content is such a perfect cure to the Google issue on so many different levels. To me, this is a good enough solution that I'm not curious for the answer anymore.

**anjel** · 03-16-2007, 06:05 AM

Google do not ban your site for duplicate content, but be sure that your site will not appear in top 10 SERP ever for plagiarism. Try to modify your content and concentrate on improving your site rankings.

**jaguar-archie15** · 03-16-2007, 08:25 AM

Its better to have a unique content then having duplicates. One factors of a good site is their uniqueness.

Might some says, So, "whats the big deal for having duplicates" . answer = Risk.... whats that for

**bzimage** · 03-16-2007, 10:33 AM

IMO, duplicate content is not a big factor anymore, obviously the search engines would figure out that if duplicate content was true, every website in the world would be labeled for it. How many times do you use the word (IT) in your websites?

**Kirtan** · 03-16-2007, 11:14 AM

Well. I don't have "content" in my site. And i won't going to place any duplicate content. Better to have nothing than duplicate one. Just curious to know the truth of it.

**Learning Newbie** · 03-16-2007, 02:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by theseokit

IMO, duplicate content is not a big factor anymore, obviously the search engines would figure out that if duplicate content was true, every website in the world would be labeled for it. How many times do you use the word (IT) in your websites?

Are you using sarcasm to make a point? If so, I missed it. Because, as you can see, the word 'it' now appears twice in my reply, and yet makes up perhaps 10 % of the reply.

**bzimage** · 03-16-2007, 03:11 PM

it was only a example of the word

**Learning Newbie** · 03-16-2007, 03:49 PM

But content is more than just one word, no? Or does the page this thread is in have thousands of different pieces of content?

**bzimage** · 03-16-2007, 03:57 PM

Again, it was only a example. I was not saying that was the only case

**stOx** · 03-16-2007, 04:33 PM

I think what Learning Newbie means is Google isn't going to think the use of any single word constitutes duplicate content. It would be like saying "YMCA" is a copy of "Beethoven's 5th" because they both feature a C# somewhere.

Duplicate content refers to the overall article as a whole rather than individual elements within it.

**bzimage** · 03-16-2007, 04:55 PM

Yes, I understand what learning newbie is saying, and I agree with him. I was only providing a example of how badly the search engines would be hated if they were that concerned about Duped Content. Its just my opinion I could easily be wrong

**Learning Newbie** · 03-16-2007, 05:42 PM

Thanks, Stox, that's a really good way to explain it. Plus, Beethoven would make a perfect "old fashioned guy" in the Village People.

SeoKit, the search engines are badly hated - by spammers. They are most assuredly concerned with duplicate content, because it's in their own best interest to refer people to good, relevant sites. We had an example in this very forum of why that's so, and why dupe content is a very easy red flag for Google to spot.

Whether there's a "duplicate content penalty" or not in the official sense really misses the point, though. Having duped content lands a URL in Google's supplemental index, or "supp hell" as the guy called it. That's not the penalty we're debating about, but it's enough of a penalty itself to make the other question moot.

Answers.com is a MFA spam site, although it's also good at fooling people. All of its content is scraped. Any article on Wikipedia, you can find on Answers.com, only with them you get all the banner ads that give my dog a seizure. Nobody would say this is a quality site. Lots of people would say Wikipedia is, though. ( I'm one of them, but I like criticizing them, too ).

Remember, Google isn't there to give you traffic. They're there to collect $$$ from ads, and they can only do that by having users, and they can only have those by producing quality results.

**bzimage** · 03-16-2007, 05:43 PM

I agree

**ForrestCroce** · 03-16-2007, 11:15 PM

I have two domain names, and until I figured out how to throw up 301s ( permanent redirects ) from one to the other, things would fluctuate a lot. Sometimes I'd come up for the same page under both domains. Right after I put the 301s up, one of my pages ( Seattle Arboretum ) fell into the "supplemental index." Basically, the place you don't want to be, if you have a web site; if anybody doesn't understand why this is bad, there's been plenty written about it.

The pages have a photo, then text arranged into something like a form, with labels that are duplicated across more than a hundred pages. Other photographers have asked what the shutter speed, or lens, or something else, was that I just list all of this. The details are different on each pages, but the labels aren't. ( And of course neither are the photos themselves. ) Google apparently doesn't consider this duplicate. More like a template.

So they seem pretty reasonable. Enough that an honest person has nothing to worry about.

**astrojith** · 03-17-2007, 09:18 AM

Well, I'm still doubtful how far AI would help Google to figure out content is duplicate or not. I mean, its vulnerable. If I copy and paste a whole article and just remove a sentence, it still is duplicate but dum ol' google won't find out ?

**stOx** · 03-17-2007, 11:56 AM

There was a matt cutts post a while ago where he said that google clasify duplicate content as content providing the same information.

So duplicate != identicle.

But unless you are actually copy and pasting it's not worth worrying about.
Unless we are going out and getting the news ourselves it all technically "duplicate".
It's because of "duplicate content" that we recieve millions of results on google searches and not just one.

**ForrestCroce** · 03-17-2007, 05:29 PM

Interesting take, Stox. Playing devil's advocate here, I bet I can come up with completely unique content by describing my cat's strange behaviors, and scoop everyone else. She likes playing with static electricity, she'll get me to pet her, then go rub her nose on metal surfaces. For the most part, nobody would care about my unique content about my cat, though.

But people are also coming up with new ways to do things in Dreamweaver, C++, and javascript, that people do care about. I guess it quickly gets duplicated, though.

If we're going to split hairs over what is or isn't dupe content, though, I'd be curious how Google looks at binary content. Like images, in my case, or mp3 files in someone else's.

**astrojith** · 03-18-2007, 08:49 AM

Google clearly isn't smart enough to scan binary content. And, if you call those things duplicate content, then original content in the world would be only 3% or something.