Duplicate content or not?

[great_9]

Let's say you have a site open for everyone (don't need to register and/or login in order to get all of the content) that only deals with press releases from IT companies.

Since you post entire press releases without any censorship/change/whatever (CTRL+C CTRL+V) would this be considered duplicate content by google? Let's say that IBM's and Microsoft's press releases are already indexed by google. Googlebot comes to your site, crawls the new pages...

Thoughts? Facts? Anyone?

[Whitey]

I'm not sure, but i think Google identfies the originating content as an "authority" and places a priority to this, established by the earliest release date.

Subsequent coverage of this content put's it at a lower priority. Only elements of content that are newly created and unique [ ie the the Press Release statement is reworded ] will count as unique.

However, i don't see this as attracting a duplicate penalty, more a level of priority.

[mattg3]

How does G handle Wikipedias "authority", as some editors just copy other peoples pages into the article? Since Wikipedia can do no wrong in G, does this destroy other peoples websites?

[soapystar]

exactly..wiki has a free hand to rip the worlds content..i have eperienced it...google ranks the wiki page....if u delete the wiki information as your right as originator someone just comes along and reverts the page..

[great_9]

So... can we get back on the topic?

Would the site described in the first message be penalised in any way? Is that duplicate content?

[tedster]

Sure, it's duplicate content. As such, those reprint page may often (but not always) be filtered out of search results in favor of the big boys who wrote the original press release -- or big name news site who also cover the story. Think "duplicate filter", not "duplicate penalty." And you can look to sites that republish all kinds of news stories to see how this is handled currently on Google.

If I were interested in this kind of business model, I would be thinking about what is my "value added" proposal. Without adding something to the original information, it is just a kind of echo. As a search user, I would want the echoes to be filtered out of most search results. Who cares where they find a press release, as long as it's accurate -- and doesn't the originating company's site offer the strongest guarantee of accuracy?

But if there is some value added, then backlinks can grow naturally because of it. I know of a parallel situation, built on a big pile of public data that's also online elsewhere. Because of the value added by a more effective site search and also by unique, top level information pages, they are doing just fine in all kinds of traffic, including search generated visitors.