The Real Deal with Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is a major issue in the World Wide Web. And it’s not about publishing your works in various places anymore. Unscrupulous people trying to cash in on other’s hard work using the Internet have been popping up everywhere and blogs such as this are being re-blogged multiple times a single day. The thought itself is abominable, but that’s just how it is. What is the real deal with duplicate content anyhow?
The first issue with duplicate content is the Google supplemental index. It’s a proven thing that duplicate content ends up in the Google supplementals. The question is which one — the original or the copy? I’ve proven it before, that the one indexed first would be in the main Google index and the copy would be in the supplementals. However, that isn’t always the case. There was one instance when someone asked me for advice because her articles were stolen. The web site who stole her articles was a PR3, she was a PR0. She was the one who got flushed down the supplementals despite having published the articles first. What does this mean? Google looks at PageRank when ranking web sites in the SERPs. Though the truth of her claim is yet to be proven — anyone up for an experiment?
With regards to articles in article repositories, the authors won’t mind you taking their articles for your web sites as long as their links remain intact. I tried doing an experiment using these articles once in blogspot. Well guess what, Blogger suspended all my blogs. There are also those who don’t include the links and paste the article body only on their web sites. So far, I haven’t seen a web site which uses articles from repositories ranking high in the SERPs. So in the end, duplicating content is not a favorable course to take.
Regarding stolen content, you can refer to these two articles on Plagiarism On The Web Part 1 and Part 2.
