Why does it have to be unique?

[carjocky]

Why does content have to be unique? If someone wants/lets me use articles and content from their page to put on mine as long as I have backlinks so that it helps promote their site. Is this bad for adsense?

[OptiRex]

Quite simply you would most probably suffer from a "duplicate penalty" within the Google SERPs.

[carjocky]

Is there any way of knowing if I am getting a penalty for this? The articles are great for the visitors and the person the wrote them likes the link and the exposure. I would hate to remove them but if it would make a difference in the SERP's I would like to know.

[hunderdown]

It will make a difference in the Google SERPs, no question. Google will try to identify the "original" and will only include that in the results, not the copy or copies. As I understand it, the penalty is only to the page, not the site.

So it might still be worth having the articles, if people are coming to your site anyway, and then find the articles. You definitely need to have SOME original content to make your site unique, but if the article is a good fit for your site and includes information not already on your site, you could use it.

The duplicate content penalty can be kind of quirky, too. I have mostly original content on my site, but I have one article from another site, used under similar conditions to the ones you talk about. If you search on Google with one variation of the relevant keywords, the article on the original site comes up. If you do a slightly different, just as likely, variation, mine comes up.

[jomaxx]

That's from the "webmaster guidelines" section, which is more related to the kind of site Google want in their search engine index. Obviously there's little benefit for the public in seeing the same article indexed over and over and over in the search results.

I don't recall a site ever being kicked out of AdSense for duplicate content (except for copyright infringement, of course).

[OptiRex]

"Copy and paste the first sentence of an article like this"

Enter it into Google and review the results.

If you're being ranked well, then no problem, if you're several pages down etc then you most probably have a penalty.

Many newscast sites post very similar articles without a duplicate penalty however they generally have great backlinks, PR etc, and then we're talking serious SEO to rise above them:-)

There's nothing wrong with having duplicate pages the problem is that, in general, they will not rank as well as unique pages consequently you would earn less:-(

[carjocky]

Thanks for the great replys!

So if I am getting this correct I should (since I cant) hire someone to write 10-15 unique articles on topics that my visitors would be interested in and get rid of the ones that are not unique.

What I want to achive is to yes have good articles for my visitors BUT my main goal is to get more search engine traffic so I can get more adsense clicks. Is my theory to add the unique and scrap the rest if they are not comming up on the serps correct?

Thanks!

[Essex_boy]

if the pages are not showing becuase they duplicate content then yes Id remove them and replace them.

[marcel]

if the pages are not showing becuase they duplicate content then yes Id remove them and replace them

Why remove them? If the visitors from other sources other than Se's find them interesting and informative there's no harm done... or is there?

It seems to me that removing an article that 'fits' perfectly with your site just because you do not get any SE traffic from it is detrimental to the visitors overall perception of your site.

[jomaxx]

Not implying you are doing this, but a lot of what passes for article writing is really just vomiting words onto a page for Google to index. IMO this is a terrible strategy.

Sure you need content to be indexed, but IMO the most important element of the Google algo is identifying quality, recommended, authority sites. To crack this nut you need people to link to you: relevant links, both homepage links and deep links, and lots of them. The only way to get this is to have interesting and useful information.

[buckworks]

What Marcel said.

If you have licensed quality articles from other sources, you don't need to get rid of them; just don't be expecting those particular pages to rank well.

[sonny]

This is an interesting take on it.

[upmarketcontent.com ]

Then again, who knows.

[frox]

Sonny, posting links is agains the TOS here.

Also, the article you are linking to is from a site that distributes syndicated content.

This is what he says:

The "duplicate content penalty" myth is one of the biggest obstacles I face in getting web professionals to embrace reprint content.

And then writes an article explaining that duplicate contents is not that important. Mhhh. A little biased, maybe?

[OptiRex]

There's nothing new in what he has written, all he is doing is trying to re-sell his own stuff, he even admits it:

Joel's articles available for reprint

All good SEOs in WebmasterWorld already know what he claims.

[carjocky]

How true is this?

If you've spent any time online trying to promote your website or business, you must have very likely realized that one of the most effective ways to generate tons of free targeted web traffic on a long term basis is to write your own informative articles and freely distribute them to other webmasters and ezine publishers for their use.

OR are you better to keep it just for yourself? Reason I am asking this now is because I just contracted 10 original articles to be written.

Thanks

[21_blue]

I'm not sure I agree with the upmarket article. I'm not sure how long it takes to damage SERPS, but it does hit pagerank initially.

We had some articles tailored for our site and after the next PR update they received a zero pagerank - very unusual on our site. This was likely indicative of a penalty.

I don't think there is any implications for Adsense directly, though; this is more a Search Forum issue.