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Spider
06-18-2011, 09:03 AM
What exactly is "Duplicate content?" I mean, to what extent is duplicate used in this case?

If one article is used on two different webpages but all the surrounding "stuff" is different (sidebars, menu, ads, layout, colors, etc.), is that duplicate content subject to penalty from the SEs?

What makes these two identical articles not identical? I could change one word and they would not be identical, but would that still be counted as "duplicate content" by the SEs?

If I totally rewrote the article and used two different versions, with different words (as much as that was possible), different phraseology, different emphasis, but coming to the same conclusion, would that be duplicate content?

Could one change 10% of the words, say, or re-order a couple of paragraphs and be safe?

Where do you draw the line?

billbenson
06-18-2011, 05:46 PM
Look at it this way. If someone makes a one sentence link drop post on 50 forums, google will figure it out and call it dup content. Thats an extreme example, but it could come down to a phrase or a sentence depending on how you use it.

Spider
06-18-2011, 08:28 PM
Wow! That's awfully nebulous, Bill. As I read what you say, I could use one phrase in an article about coaching and you use the same phrase in an article about safety and the articles would be considered duplicate content? And the person who was second in time posting their article would be penalized?

Okay, I realize we are talking extreme situations, here, and that the SEs would likely take further steps to inquire once the red flag had been raised, but there are only so many words in the English language and I'm sure we are all using duplicate phrases all the time.

Basically, I'm trying to determine what I must do to not get penalized for duplicate content. I know, the answer is - Don't use the same article more than once, but we all have our specialties and we do talk about - and therefore, write about - the same subjects on more than one occasion. Even if we are writing totally fresh, if it is about a subject we have written before, and especially if it is a subject about which we are constantly speaking, one article is eventually going to soind like another.

billbenson
06-19-2011, 12:58 AM
Vangogh has said many times that dup content doesn't give you a penalty but rather dilutes the first occurrence of that term. I don't necessarily agree with that as an exact, no exceptions interpretation (if thats what VG meant) but it makes a lot of sense in concept. If you aren't spamming or keyword stuffing, try to reword things slightly when you can and you should be fine.

Patrysha
06-19-2011, 01:12 PM
The standard that my friends who use a lot of PLR and ghostwritten work is to change the article by at least 30%...

Spider
06-20-2011, 08:58 AM
Thanks, guys - that's helpful.

Business Attorney
06-20-2011, 10:05 AM
What I've read is that the title and the first paragraph are particularly important in determining whether two articles are going to be treated as duplicates by the search engines. I would concentrate on those particularly.

954SEO
06-20-2011, 10:40 AM
Agree. I've done a bit of research on it. First sentence, links, and headers/bold words in particular get picked up by the bots, so a lot of folks reuse ENTIRE articles and change only these few things. Not for article submission, per se, but for content on their own page.

vangogh
06-20-2011, 11:36 AM
First there's no specific amount where content goes from being unique to duplicate. The less duplication the better. Search engines are smart enough to separate the content from the design around it. So the same article on 2 different sites is still 100% duplicate.

There is no duplicate content penalty in general. If you run a site where every page is duplicating other pages from other sites then maybe search engines realize your stealing content from across the web and penalize your site, but for most of us there's no penalty. From a search engine perspective it makes no sense to have a list of results that all point to the same content. That's not a good experience for their users. They only want to see the same content listed once so they'll determine which version they think is the most important and rank that, while not showing any of the other pages in the results.

Ideally the "most important" version would be the original, but that's not always the case. Also search engines still end up listing multiple results for the same content even though they say they don't want to.

With your original question just rewrite the article. Don't try to outthink duplicate content and figure out exactly how much should change. You can write about the same topic and even use many of the same words or quote the other article, but make sure it reads like a unique piece of content to real people. Give each article a different title, different headlines, etc. If the article looks unique to real people it'll look unique to search engines too.

Spider
06-20-2011, 02:31 PM
Great - thanks.

cbscreative
06-21-2011, 11:12 AM
Although vangogh kind of said this, I'll say it a different way to help simplify the principle. Even if you don't get a "penalty" for duplicate content, you don't get any reward either so there's no advantage to it.

I find that even though you may be limited in the topics you would write or talk about, there's always a unique way to present it—a different analogy to use or different examples to make your point.

vangogh
06-21-2011, 12:51 PM
you may be limited in the topics you would write or talk about

I don't think that's ever true. I think there are always topics to write or talk about. Those topics may not jump out at you, but they're there. Your point about finding a unique way to present the same topic is a good one. Very little is truly original. Most everything builds on other things or comes at them from a different angle. Finding something new to write about is often looking at things that have already been written about and writing about them in a different way.

There's also nothing wrong with covering the same topic from a similar perspective. You can write the same article without using the exact same words, which would still make both articles unique.