why bother with duplicate content on your site?

only that page will suffer right?

[koen]

I can post some newsletters on my site and would like to do so. I know they are published elsewhere and so these are duplicate content at my site. I prefer to post them because of completeness. And I can solve the duplicate problem easily with a robots.txt. But why bother? As far as I understand there is no site penalty for duplicate content. At least that is what Matt said somewhere. Probably only that page won't be seen in the SERPS. So I don't think I should bother.

Anyone else opinions on this?

[Patrick Taylor]

On one of my sites I have pages that include texts from a book, which are also published on many sites elsewhere. My pages are doing fine. I'd go ahead and not worry about it. I don't think you will be penalised as such. It's just a question of whose pages do best in SERPS, which depends on a variety of factors not all related to the 'duplicate content.'

I think what Google is aiming at is not to penalise anyone, but rather not to deliver result sets with lots of the same content.

[annej]

I always put a robots noindex on pages like that. Then I have the information for my visitors and don't have to worry about dup content.

[GuinnessGuy]

I've been wondering about this myself. Let's face it, if one were doing a site that was about the most famous documents in the world, for example, would the site get anywhere in Google since almost all the pages would have content that could be found in many many other pages on other sites?

Speaking more generally -- if one were to have content that is dup'ed outside one's domain, but it is highly related to the theme of the index page(and perhaps other pages), then having a link on that page back to the home page should be good since it is not only a backlink, but one that is on topic?

Or is it that google does not give credit to that backlink(or give diminished credit) when it senses that the backlink comes from a page containing content that is NOT original?

So let's say I were to have some unoriginal articles but they were highly related to the page(s) I want to rank well and had link(s) to back to those page(s). Would Google give the same boost to those pages that it would if the linking pages were orginal AND on topic, or give less?

GuinnessGuy

[DerekH]

A lot of sites have printer-friendly pages that are lightweight-formatted versions of the screen page. Yes, CSS is better but...

I see for a lot of these sites that only the screen version appears in a Google listing unless you dig deep and ask Google for all pages from that site. This seems to confirm the widely held belief that if you have duplicate pages, the duplicate merely slides down the SERPS and does not attract any other sort of penalty.
DerekH

[yandos]

DerekH, the OP was talking about duplicates of his newsletter on other sites, not duplicate pages on his own site. I think that duplicate content via printer friendly versions of pages can case an issue, seem to recall someone talking about going into supp hell due to this very issue.