Duplicate content

News web sites

[allanp73]

Recently I was doing some research on a upcoming television show and visited many news websites (NY times) to read articles on it. I was amazed when I found the same articles appearing on multiple sites. I realized what was happening; when the show does a press release it gets picked up by many newspapers and news agencies who add the article to their site with little or no change. These news agencies have excellent pr and none received any form of penalty for having the same content. I wonder how much of their web sites would be dup content related.
Show I write a spam report? ;)
All joking aside, the point remains the same. Much of the pr on these sites is based off of their shear numbers of pages. Why should these sites get away with what little mom and pop sites would most likely get banned for?
Just some food for thought.

[chris_f]

I think to answer your arguement you have to look at the whole site and all it's content rather than just a page. For instance, why should one page of duplicate content play a heavy weight. I don't think it should. If you mirror a site then it is usless and should be penalised but that's it.

News sites aren't going to have every article the same and they are going to have different editoral stances. Therefore, I generally think it is good that Google does not penalise these sites.

Chris

[enotalone]

hi allanp73
for more than 2 years i was working with a system that would place articles in a primary category, but also if possible find and list the same artcle on related category. therefore, lots of (thousands) pages had duplicate content, though some elements on pages (related books, articles, links to related forums etc.) were changing depending on the category. Well the point is i never been banned with this system, the site always has had a great traffic from google. i changed the system just because i felt it was not normal to have duplicate content, instead emphasising interlinking of related categories than phisically having content sharing between categories. anyway, i feel that you have a point that google will not panish sites he likes, big sites for this, but maybe will do for small sites. The question is does size matter with google? i think it does.

[vincevincevince]

take the FAQ page on phpbb boards.
almost every FAQ is an exact dup content of each other.
if google was so fussy about the odd page of dup content it would have killed all the sites using phpbb.