Does G punish me for publishing other people's content?

With their permission of course!

[Lokutus]

I am filling in some of the gaps on my sites with articles published on other sites. I only do so after obtaining permission from the copyright holder.

Does having duplicate content worl against me in G's algorythm? How about in Y's?

[diamondgrl]

In theory, yes, you would be penalized, at least for those pages.

Google and Yahoo have no idea whether you have permission and they don't much care - a searcher doesn't want to find the same article again and again in the same search. Once it turns up once in the SERPs, that's enough.

[webdude]

This actually brings up a good point that I have always been somewhat confused about, but not really concerned.

I don't think that a copy of an article on a particular site would cause a dupe content penalty. I mean, your site is different (I would hope). You have different links, menus, headers, js, css, titles, descriptions, layout, etc. etc. It would be hard pressed for the algo to penalize a site for just the article, especially if the article is mixed with other articles. And think of all the news sites that pick up an AP story and run with it. I don't think these sites would be penalized either.

On one of my sites, I post articles that are posted on other sites with no problems. The pages are crawled and picked up in the index just fine. Maybe not ranked exactly where I would like them ;-) but there none the less.

There are probably many factors that go into determining whether a site is duplicating another site or not. Someone correct me if I am wrong here.

[Lokutus]

bump

Let's hear more.

[Lokutus]

>I don't think that a copy of an article on a particular site would cause a dupe content penalty.

I agree. Oftentimes I will look for a specific article before buying it. My search results will show two or three sites which have free copies all on the first SERP.

Now maybe that's because I searched for it under it's exact title?

[chrisnrae]

If I use dup content on a site like an article, I usually block the spiders from accessing it. Making it still available to users but not available for the SE's to index.

[phantombookman]

If you use an existing piece I believe (for what it is worth) that if you add some unique content to the page, change the layout and HTML of the article etc you could make the page different enough to avoid penalty. Some of the directory and wiki scourers seem to do it.

[Nuttakorn]

Google may mot punish the site which put the other people's content. For example, there are many website which are shown the content from other resource like RSS Feed, XML, or Article from prweb.com or something like that.

If Google punish those site, nobody will not spending the money for publish their press release to those services.

[experienced]

We did, We does, We would :-)

[Lokutus]

>We did, We does, We would :-)

Ok, what does this mean in English?

[internetheaven]

There is a percentage duplicate content filter in place but no-one but the Google gods know what that percentage is. The general consensus is that if your page is over 50% the same as another in Google's index, a duplicate filter will be triggered. (Which of you gets penalised is up to Google ...)

Some have stated that they believe that anything over 20% duplication will trigger it though.

If you are only listing the article in a page on your site which has sufficient content surrounding it then you should be fine. It would be seriously demented if Google were to ban sites based on a few paragraphs that matched because of the large amount of news articles on the web.

[patoruzu]

>>Google may not punish the site which put the other people's content<<

The site is not punished. Google "downgrades" the page (not the site) with duplicate content (at least in theory).

[Nuttakorn]

"The site is not punished. Google "downgrades" the page (not the site) with duplicate content (at least in theory). "

Downgrade the page value is that means the value of those page will be low and if you have got another value to that page like quality link from high pagerank and directory or may get value from authority site. Is that possible to those page will be apppeared on listing in google.

I am not sure that google will check content from what? Source code in exactly with another content site or just wording. If you arrange the page in new style like adding bold, italic, color, font and paragraph. Is google see this one is duplicated content with another site or original content.

[Lokutus]

Is it true that the G and Y's spiders only crawl the top two levels of pages on a site? If this is true, the borrowed content on a third level page is highly unlikely to be caught.

[Lokutus]

bump

[bignet]

no in short

[LukeC]

I have heard that the processing power to match content between every site online is too much, that they only analyse duplicate content WITHIN a site (auto generated pages etc).

While I am sure this isn't the case, it's odd how many espotting and overture paid listing sites seem to quite happily rank well in Google to this day - they all have exactly the same content and I don't see much in the way of a penalty happening there.

[instinct]

I tend to agree with LukeC, how could G possible compare one indexed page to every other in its index? It might be possible to identify exact copies (via checksum I imagine) but with so many slight variations possible in the surrounding code (ie naviagation etc) I don't think it could be done.

<speculation>
However, I have also heard that if you link from your site to the site where the content was originally published then G might notice the duplicate. For example, if you have permission to reprint an article but the author requires you to link back to his/her site.

Something else I have heard is that if your site shares the same directory structure as the original site, this might set off a red flag as well (think dmoz clones)
</speculation>

just my $0.02