Livenomadic - 8:04 pm on Sep 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

I have long believed in the duplicate content penalty, that is: When the majority of the content on two seperate webpages (on different sites) is the same, the one with the higher PR will be shown and the other one will not.

However, last week for university I was required to read "The Roots of Muslim Rage" by Bernard Lewis, originally published in 1990.

Here is my Google search for "The Roots of Muslim Rage" [google.com]

As becomes plainly obvious with the results, on the first page of results, 8 of 10 pages are displaying the ariticle, and ALL have atleast some PR:

Listing 1: PageRank 6 (Possible Authority Site)
Listing 2: PageRank 4 (Possible Authority Site)
Listing 3: PageRank 4 (Not Authority Site)
Listing 4: PageRank 3 (Not Authority Site)
Listing 5: PageRank 3 (Not Authority Site)
Listing 6: <Not the Article>
Listing 7: PageRank 1 (Not Authority Site)
Listing 8: PageRank 2 (Not Authority Site)
Listing 9: PageRank 3 (Possible Authority Site)
Listing 10: <Not the Article>

More interesting still, the first listing (Atlantic Monthly) is where the article was originally published. And the 9th listing acutally links to the first listing.

Therefore, google ISN'T penalizing these pages for showing the same content.

Comments? Explainations? Other Examples? Lets see if we can get to the bottom of this!