Duplicate content

[monaghanmonaghan is verified member.]

There's a lot of mention of avoiding duplicate content between sites as this can impact rankings. Is this really the case? When searching Google, I often get many results all showing the same harvested threads from support forums why would this get through the screening filter where other content doesn't?

 

[vizzo]

I think that's a good point. I found that with a search i did yesterday - duplicate content and it wasn't even relevant!
I think you are more likely to get it for more obscure searches.
I think we all assume that those sites will disappear soon, but the trouble is that if they do they get replaced by others.

 

[arold10]

Well, although Google has a duplicate content filter, I don't think that the filter will never be able to filter out duplicate content at a rate of %100. Duplicate content seems to be an issue when people keep re-posting the same content over and over on their site just to manipulate the system to get better ranking for their targeted keywords. If you have same content spread all over various website, I don't really think that can get your site penalized.

 

[Blossom]

Hard to answer your question without more specifics. You're more likely to see that situation if:

- there aren't many results for whatever you searched for
- the site has great authority but poor SEO
- there are different snippets of threads pulled through to create a page. Then this is repeated, fooling the system into thinking it's unique content, but resulting in lots of pages with the same or very similar content

I'm sure there are other situations too; those are the ones I thought of off the top of my head. Search results seem to be throwing up a larger amount of crap than usual at the moment as well.