Duplicate Content Question

[pokerextras]

Is duplicate content only classed as duplicate content by google when it's displayed at the same time as identical content, or is it still classed as duplicate content if it's been displayed somewhere before, but isn't any longer. The reason that i ask, is because i'm in the middle of adding site reviews to my rakeback site, but will very soon be launching a new educational poker site, at which point i plan to remove the reviews from my rakeback site, and display them on my new site. Am i likely to be penalised for this? Should i not add the reviews to my rakeback site at all, and instead wait for my other site to be ready, or won't it matter?

[kingcobra]

This is a very good question and to be honest I'd imagine that if the old content isn't live or currently cached then you'd be all right. This isn't an area which I have any expertise with and have never had anything other than unique content so I'll leave it to others who may know more about this stuff to chime in.

[chaumi]

I think this is exactly what KingCobra is saying....I've worked on the basis recently that if i couldn't turn up my old content in a quoted exact search in Google..then it was safe to republish.

Seems to be OK so far because new pages on a new site using old previously indexed content have got indexed OK, though as said it's difficult to be entirely sure whether it has an impact on positioning.

[kingcobra]

Actually as I think about this a little more, just remove the content from the old site and replace it with the new one. Leave the old site up so the pages with the original content can be crawled with something else there, then you should be fine, even though it's another site.

[pokerextras]

What i'm concerned about is the content being removed from the old site and added to the new site. The new site gets crawled before the old one, so as far as google are concerned, the content is on both as the old one hasn't been crawled yet. The new site is penalised for this, then once google discovers that the old site is no longer displaying the content, the penalty is already registered, and doesn't go away. Is this likely to happen?

[kingcobra]

Well we're not talking about anything really significant here anyway, it's not a penalty it's more that your content won't be given full credit if it isn't original. Keep in mind though that there are a lot of sites that run all sorts of RSS feeds which is all duplicate and some do quite well.

Personally I'd still remove the content from the old site before I had the new site indexed, but it's not really a big deal I don't think. The new site will take a while to get some good rankings anyway where it might matter and that will be plenty of time to purge any of this stuff.

[AceMaster]

I have done a bit of reading and agree with what Ken just said. The site doesn't get penalized, the content doesn't rank as easily. The example I was given was Associated Press Stories. All of the major news sites publish them straight from AP, but those sites still rank. CNN.com especially ranks #1 if you search news. So from the way I understand it, you can put up the new content, and once the old content is found to be no longer there, it will begin to rank higher.

[JasonDuke]

Just remember that the busiest site on the web is full of duplicate content - google.com hardly has any content written by their own far hands!

[kingcobra]

Google will rank rather well on Google in any case I presume

This does bring up a good point though and the rep and power of the site will factor into this pretty well. For instance if you originate a story on your little site and CNN picks it up what do you figure your chances are of outranking them? So in other words being the original publisher while it matters isn't the only thing.

[pokerextras]

Sure, but i still don't think that cnn would get any credit for the article if it was a straight copy.