Why are Article Submission Sites not penalized for Duplicate content?

[kinley]

Hey,

We all are always too skeptical of getting penalized by Google (and other search engines) if we have duplicate content on our site.

Then why are Article Submission sites not affected by this as 95% of their content is duplicate (in terms of users submitting the same content to many such sites at one go).

Similarly, News Aggregating sites pick up content from original sources and then re-post it as their own without any problem ! (they just give a credit link at the bottom of the content)

What is the concept behind this ?

Thanks.

[purplecape]

How do you know they are not affected?

[justinw1970]

Duplicate Content Penalty is somewhat of a myth.

Interesting article about it here:

[article-blog.thephantomwriters.com...]

If I am allowed to post the link. If not Just google duplicate content penalty myth matt cutts.

If Duplicate Content was really true I would be posting thousands of websites with my competitors content!

[purplecape]

IMO it's not a penalty per se. Content that is identified as a duplicate of an original doesn't get ranked as high as the original...

Now I better read that article to see if I put my foot in my mouth.

[purplecape]

Umm. I could poke a lot of holes in that article, not to mention his selective quoting from Matt Cutts.

I'll just point out the largest--he "demonstrates" that duplicate content doesn't get penalized or downgraded or whatever by searching on lengthy phrases, or the title of the article, in quotation marks.

When you narrow the search to such an extreme degree, you force Google into a narrow collection of results, and so versions of the same article WILL appear.

However, if you search on a few relevant keywords, you will find that ONE copy of the article shows up at the top (whether that's on the first page of the SERPs or the 10th), well above all the others, if you can find them at all. They may be IN the results, but they're shoved way down.

[purplecape]

justin, the author of that article you linked to untentionally proved my point.

I got curious and I went to Google and did a search on "top Google ranking" (with no quotation marks). This returned 270 millions results. Did his article rank at the top?

No, unless you consider #30 in the results to be close enough. But it wasn't the original he linked to -- as far as I could see it was a copy that outranked his original, perhaps due to it being on a site regarded as more authoritative by Google. NO more copies of the article, including the original, appeared in the top 100.

I think that illustrates the dangers of multiple copies of an article being out there. One copy will rank high(er) in Google, and the others will be... somewhere else.

[shamims]

I think they are affected....you know the famous afticles submission sites like ezine don't allow the duplicate content. The sites who are accepting duplicate contents they must have to be punished.

[creative craig]

I dont think the article hosting sites care if they are listed as having duplicate content - as their sites grow in size in turn their visitor numbers grow, I would imagine mostly from obscure long tail searches.

They can then sell links, run adsense or Kontera in order to monetise and make it viable in the long run.

[WhitneySegura]

A website needs a minimum amount of PageRank to get indexed and cached into the main index, this explains why you are having the duplicate articles pop up in the SERPs. My recommendation to you is to think outside of the box..........