Duplicate Content: It’s Not What You Think!

[erikko]

im not accounting on DP alone. some SEO forums do say this account and also Google Webmasters blog. Let's drop the subject what matters is that dupe content doesn't make a site penalized

[SilvernGold]

Gotta be honest.. ive known for years dupe content is a myth.. i happily just write an article and post it to 300 article sites in under 3 mnutes and never had a problem
- dont forget they dont all get listed straight away too.. alot are held for review first.

good luck

[MNSandy]

Where is the line between duplicate and not duplicate; had some experience where article + unique menu didn't do the job at all, like 80% of articles were removed;

[jcorkern]

If you could give more detail, I can probably give you an accurate answer. Was it articles you hosted on your site(s)?

I can tell you that most of the time, articles can be brought out of any trouble with just a few quality inbound links. I really doubt that duplicate content is the issue, something else is factoring in this situation.

[MNSandy]

Imagine a site with 1000 pages, in 10 categories. So each of categories had around 70-100 links on the left side. Articles were 300-600 words each.

Nearly all went supplemental at that times (feb 2006), and a bit later - got removed form index to nearly 90%.

Maybe too massive menu?

[Rob_TID]

Originally Posted by MNSandy

Imagine a site with 1000 pages, in 10 categories. So each of categories had around 70-100 links on the left side. Articles were 300-600 words each.

Nearly all went supplemental at that times (feb 2006), and a bit later - got removed form index to nearly 90%.

Maybe too massive menu?

That happened to a site of mine recently. The nav menu was so long it was actually the majority of content on a lot of the pages.

I reduced the nav menu, put on a sitemap and regained my rankings.

[jcorkern]

I have a friend that has a site for a major keyword that started over linking (Internal linking) and was punished. He had the same experience and dropped his links to max 50 in nav and his went back up.

[Angie3641]

Thank you very much for this post. There is SO much information floating around about "duplicate content" and people are afraid to even use their OWN articles on their own websites, if they've ever placed them on any article directory. That's the whole point of an article directory; for webmasters to pick articles to use on their sites.

[v9designbuild]

I have written in my own blog before that it is a myth but not with quite so much detailed research. Thanks. A story I wrote last Sunday was submitted to around twelve article websites, with no change in the body text, heading or abstract whatsoever. I have never bought into the myth except, as Jim rightly points out, where you duplicate an entire site; I have also seen a client report a competitor to Google with a DMCA for duplicated their pages and they banned them all, but just the duplicates, not the site.

[Mimi]

I am new to this forum and this thread has been a HUGE eye opener for me, I believed the duplicate content myth
I wonder how things will change now, it is very exciting actually. Thanks for this information Jim and everyone else who has contributed.