Forum Moderators: martinibuster
After you have the one good link, do you think it matters how many other sites publish, and link back to your site, with the exact same article?
I've always been in the more the merrier camp, whether it's dmoz clones or sites replicating your submitted article across their network. If there's no link pop at least there's traffic.
However my understanding is, and I could be mistaken, but unless a page has been manually tweaked, there's going to be some pop, even if it's deprecated, which could be the case. The page hosting the submitted content might not rank, but that's besides the point for this discussion. What matters is the juice flowing from that site.
Some questions to think about
Do you think pages with duplicate content don't pass PR?
If the search engines were to stop a page from passing PR on pages with dupe content, would this damage innocent sites?
Juice
No juice
Deprecated juice?
I've always been in the more the merrier camp, whether it's dmoz clones or sites replicating your submitted article across their network. If there's no link pop at least there's traffic.
That's a good point. Some of those other links still bring in traffic. Plus sometimes people copy your article from sites where your article appears, and many honest souls will even keep the links in and working.
The issue is it takes time to do the submissions, so I'm wondering where the point is of diminishing returns, and when my time would be better spent writing a fresh article.
I think the first separation should be between duplicate documents, and similar ones. And duplicate may not be exact, but is to all intents and purposes an identical document. I believe this type will usually involve HTML as well as textual duplication.
When "exact" (exact enough) duplicates are detected, only one of the document gets the ranking signals and link benefit. But not all duplicates are detected by search engines and such. Canonical URL problems become serious as a direct result of duplicates getting link benefit in their own right.
Similar pages are a different matter. I believe this type usually contains duplicated text or sections of text, but different HTML. As with duplicates, you're unlikely to retrieve more than a handful with a general-purpose search query, but they still get at least some link benefit.
Personally, I'd be unconvinced that link equity necessarily decreases because a document fits a similarity profile (or even a duplicate one). But, I wouldn't be surprised if many article sites had less link equity than might be expected, or were even prevented from passing benefit as a result of large-scale duplication of content available elsewhere.
