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I am running a topic specific directory and I just came across a wonderful site that is a sort of encyclopedia of terms that relate to my topic. I was thinking of using some of the entries (with permission) from the encyclopedia site as added information in each of my categories. I think my visitors would find this interesting and useful. I would also be linking back to the encyclopedia site on each page where the citations appear. But, what I am wondering is would it be worth it as far as having the same text on my site that already appears on his site? I don't want to go to all the trouble if I just end up getting a duplicate content penalty because that would be kind of the opposite of what I am trying to accomplish.
Thank you in advance for your opinions and advice!
You may find a lot of sites has taken his content, search for a chunk of his text in quotes and see what comes up.
Of course, if his pages from which you are taking the text are not indexed by google, you will rank OK. However, give him a link to those pages, and they will then get indexed and may achieve the higher pr in the future.
I don't think duplicate content is given a 'penalty' but instead is ignored.
you get your pages (the internal ones) to have a higher pr than the original site... you win and the text is taken, while his will be ignored.
Does anyone else agree with this? If true all we have to do is be the site with the highest PR and spider all the good content on the net and replace all of our compedators pages with our own plagurized content. Thereby knocking them out of the top positions for what was their own origional content (and I believe content eventually equates to traffic).
Another scary scenario could be to duplicate a website almost entirely, and simply have a higher PR than the origionating site, thus replacing all of its pages in the SERPS with your own stolen content...
I don't think this would count as duplicate content because you would be taking snippets from the other site and you would probably have different overall content around the duplicate content. I see many news sites that use the same articles but none suffer from a duplicate content penalty or receive a pr0 on offending pages. I think dup content only happens when the entire page is duplicated or there is a very high percentage of the same content 99%.
Personally, I don't believe in worrying what Google says. Build sites for yourself and for your users.
I agree, but the text in the duplicated snippets may be ignored. The question is how does google identify duplicate content and in what detail. Can it recognise a small parcel of text as duplicate, or is it overall word count of the page?
I think dup content only happens when the entire page is duplicated or there is a very high percentage of the same content 99%.
I believe the same thing - perhaps a bit lower than 99% - all you need to do is look at all the products that have the same descriptions on various sites etc (I cant really see how Google can justifiably (sp?) filter these sites out either - two companies that sell DVDs for example may well have the same title and blurb! - who are Google to judge which one to filter out?)
These affiliate pages will probably have been produced by seo savvy webmasters and dominate the top positions. The pages are often 50% affiliate content with a mix of other pointless content.
I have noticed a reduction in the rankings of these sites which I suspect is a duplicate content filter being a bit more sophisticated. The chosen site is not always just the highest pr, it is also hilltop factors in conjunction with duplicate filter...IMHO
