Using Wikipedia Content - Impact on Google Search

[loner]

Are there adverse consequences from using wikipedia articles in combination with existing content on separate pages?

[dibbern2]

Its called duplicate content.

penalty. serious.

Doesn't it bother you to consider this approach?

[loner]

Nah, it doesn't bother me at all. It's legal to use the content if I choose. I do make sure content on my site is accurate, and the bit of Wikipedia I've used in the past has been terrible I usually ignore it or rewrite it.

I'm wondering though, say if I were to republish legal content from maybe 50 different sites and combine them with some original articles, would there be a penalty for duplicate content, and if so, how serious?

[jomaxx]

I'd suggest putting the articles in a separate directory and ban it via robots.txt. Google will never even see the duplicated content. The pages won't rank, but in all likelihood they wouldn't have anyways.

That way you'll be able to put this problem behind you. I don't see how anyone could really give you a hard and fast answer about what will happen, or how much duplicated content is too much.

(BTW, per your other thread, you can ban Googlebot while still allowing the AdSense "Mediapartners" spider. I doubt that would involve any risk.)

[jakegotmail]

put all legal ramifications to the side here.

I am pretty sure I have seen sites doing this and not having any issues with dup. content.

However they do have lots of other content on the page.

[Fauxpaw]

As long as you follow the rules of the GNU Free Documentation License, you can copy and republish as much of the Wikipedia as you please. Here are a few key pages to read:

[en.wikipedia.org...]
[en.wikipedia.org...]
[en.wikipedia.org...]

Here's where you can grab database dumps:

[download.wikimedia.org...]

Here's where you can export a few pages at a time:

[en.wikipedia.org...]