Duplicate Content or Not

[kaus]

If say 100 sites had pages relating to the same subject of dogs. Say each of those sites also had a small portion on thier page that was identical to the rest of the sites could this trigger a duplicate penalty? Each page is unique except for say 100 -150 words. I imagine that it would depend on the length of each page in text but just general assumption

Would this be enough to be considered duplicate content and if it would be able to slide through could their be any other negatives that I should take into consideration. I have a really cool idea that is feasible but it would require that a small portion of content be exactly the same.

[Dave]

could this trigger a duplicate penalty

There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.

Blatant duplicate content on your site may not be indexed or devalued by the SE's because you are not supplying any new information that isn't already available.... but the search engines will not penalize your entire site just because you are repeating yourself here and there, or with someone else's approximate content to your own.

This is one of the biggest myths out there.

Just like the grassy nole and dead alien bodies at Roswell.

[kaus]

Ok great thanks Dave...so I guess my next question would be could someone still optimize a page with one of their keywords based around the duplicate text,

So as an example I am offering a service where I will be able to update your pages on the newest dark blue widgets available. Your page is about all kinds of widgets but you also want to target dark blue widgets...is this still possible? I am think on one hand not likely since there will be multiple sites all optimized similar for Dark blue Widgets, but on the other hand other variables could change this.

To complicate this lets add php into it. If I updated your page using one simple line of php which would pull the content from my site it would not be available as duplicate since the actual content is not physically available on your site. So if that be the case, would proper tags be sufficiant for optimizing the page for dark blue widgets using the php route?

[Dave]

I bet you are way over thinking this thing Cheryle.

The basics are correct 95% of the time.

PM me the details and I'll give you my opinion.

P.S.

I avoid PHP when ever possible.... endless aboslutly necessary.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Dave

There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.

Matt Cutts seems to disagree:

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-08-02-n60.html

[Dave]

Q: When does Google detect duplicate content, and within which range will duplicate be duplicate?

A: Good question. That’s not a simple answer... the short answer is, we do a lot of duplicate content detection. It’s not like there’s one stage where we say, OK, right here is where we detect the duplicates. Rather, it’s all the way from the crawl, through the indexing, through the scoring, until finally just milliseconds before you answer things.

And there are different types of duplicate content. There’s certainly exact duplicate detection. So if one page looks exactly the same as another page, that can be quite helpful, but at the same time it’s not the case that pages are always exactly the same. And so we also detect near duplicates, and we use a lot of sophisticated logic to do that.
IIn general, if you think you might be having problems, your best guess is probably to make sure your pages are quite different from each other, because we do do a lot of different duplicate detection... to crawl less, and to provide better results and more diversity.

we do a lot of duplicate content detection

Doing a lot of ( ha ha joke) duplicate detection

Is a far cry from a duplicate content penalty that effects your whole site.

[PPP]

Duplicate content effecting a whole site wasn't part of the original question.

There is such a thing as a duplicate content penalty and when assessed they are the harshest penalty that there is: total death sentence.

Sometimes these penalties are perfectly fine with webmasters, and even welcome, like when the non-www URL is penalized out of the index, or when thieving scumbags have their copies of sites removed from the index (this of course is an example when a penalty is sitewide).

Google's near duplicate detection and the penalties from that are one of the most important things webmasters need to consider these days. Pages that are too similar to each other (obvious example, photo page one, photo page two, photo page three... where all the photos only have captions like "Jeremy in Cyprus") will get those pages dumped/penalized into the supplemental index.

Each page being unique except for 150 words is the wrong way to look at it. How much is unique? 200 words? 600? 2000? The bigger the unique number the less of a risk.

Pages will normally have some duplicate content in navigation and other template stuff. Correct page construction today means you have to have a lot of unique content on each page to compensate... and the more non-unique stuff you have, the more unique content you should strive for.

[kaus]

Originally Posted by PPP

Each page being unique except for 150 words is the wrong way to look at it. How much is unique? 200 words? 600? 2000? The bigger the unique number the less of a risk.
.

Thanks PPP, I figured the amount of content on each page would play a big role in it.

I know php does not replace real content but if that was used could someone still target keywords based on tags?

[Dave]

There is such a thing as a duplicate content penalty and when assessed they are the harshest penalty that there is: total death sentence.

Prove it?

Google's near duplicate detection and the penalties from that are one of the most important things webmasters need to consider these days.

Prove it?

I double dare you!

I'm really looking foreward to this debate!

[Graham]

Dave, are you saying you don't think google will remove what it considers to be duplicate entries?