Duplicate Content

[kaus]

If I use someone else's articles ( with permission) and provide backlinks can this be seen as dup. content?

[Randy]

Yep, if the articles have been published elsewhere online.

[Dave]

I disagree with you Randy.

Yes dup content on your own site is trickery and SEO death.

Posting articles from other sources on your site is now excepted practice and will not hurt you.

It wont help you in the SERP's........ but you will not be penalized.

Just make sure they don't backlink to crap.

DON"T EVER LINK FROM YOUR SITE TO GARBAGE!

Your personal reputation and your sites cred depends on it.

[Kyle]

I'm pretty sure the question is just if it will be seen as duplicate content or not. If it is indexed already, like Randy said, it will be seen as dup. content and it will more than likely end up in supplemental results.

I do agree that you will not get penalized because of using somebody else's quality article you just might not rank so well with that page. It is still beneficial to your site if it is quality content because you need something for your users to do while they are on your site and the more the better.

You also make a good point about linking to bad neighborhoods. I think something that is smart to do is go through external links on your websites that you have not checked in a while and see if they are still linking to the original site you linked to. Sites change as well as change hands and you could be linking to bad neighborhoods even if you think you've been careful. It is worth it to do this because linking to banned sites or heavily penalized sites on google is probably going to negatively effect your site as well.

[Randy]

Duplicate content is duplicate content. If they're the same words on two different pages, then that's duplicate content (by definition).

People can make their own decisions about whether or not duplicate content will hurt them in the search engines.

[PPP]

Articles on multiple sites is duplicate content by definition, and search engines try hard to filter out the duplicates. Obviously it woud be dumb to return the same articel ten times in the search results.

Of cource, search engines aren't close to perfect in detecting duplicates so they often slip through.

[Zilla]

A question with a slightly different spin on this subject.

... I write an article and publish it on my website.

At a later date I then provide the same article to other sites containing a link back to my site.

Does this effect the SEO of the original article on my site?

ie: from what your saying above then in most cases Google would recognise the article on the other sites as duplicate and put it in the supplementals, but would the original article and original location be unaffected by this as if it hadn't been published elsewhere?

[fatbill]

whoa be to those that disregard SEO advice from Randy.... ;-)

[edmc]

I wouldnt say the article in itself would be flagged as a dup, its the page as a whole, otherwise half of the joke sites would disappear from the serps

[losercore]

Ther is tons of duplicate content out there. All over the place.

Take a look a some of the SPAM Adsense sites out there. RSS feeds you name it. Not to mention like edmc said what about joke sites, quote sites all that stuff is the same.

The point is does it hurt you?

I have to say it can but if you are good it wont. I have proof of this because I've done it many times. One of my old sites started of with nothing but articles that were given to me from other sites. I quickly created proper SEO and even added some external links to those pages. I was quickly on top of Google for keywords in those articles and I surpassed the the sites that gave them to me to use. I can say that about 5 of those articels were indexed in Google on about 20 other sites. I was #1 of course for most keywords because I was better at optimizing my site than they were.

There is a fine line here about having duplicate content, but it's not always bad or how would RSS blogs, news feeds, auto generated SPAM pages even be indexed. Why do they rank high in Google? Good SEO.

If you take the exact same article and give it to 2 sites and one lets Google find it and list it and that's all. Then the other adds good internal links to the page, adds external links to the page, optimizes the keywords and adds proper tags, the second one will be on top of Google regardless if the first one was indedxed first.

Just think about. Plus it's so hard to have "EXACT" copies as SE's read the code. So the code in your template or page will throw off an SE in most cases as well. Add an H1 tag a few h2 tags. Now it's not the same.

I would not worrry about dup content all that much. I would be more worried about giving your content out so others can beat you in the serp's