Thread: COPIED CONTENT IS NOT A PROBLEM ... true or false ???

Hi all,

I thought I would stir things up a little - no doubt this has been argued many times before but I really didn't have time to go through over 1300 threads.

I SAY COPIED CONTENT IS NOT AN ISSUE WITH GOOGLE ........ thousands will disagree so let me elaborate.

Firstly I am a believer in explaining ones comments or viewpoints as best as possible so if anyone is going to reply to this post with a simple WTF, or are you kidding or similar without then offering thier reasons then please do not bother. Oh, and before we go too much further, I DO NOT PROFESS TO BE AN EXPERT so what you read here is my opinion only, nothing more, and everyone is welcome to agree to disagree

OK back to that rash statement, here is my logic / reasoning. Google does not have the capability to crawl every single page on the web let alone record and store everything its crawlers "have seen" on the web over a long period of time - it does store and record certain information for a certain period of time though we do not really know for how long, is it a month, a week, a year??. The crawlers use algorithms - these algorithms are essentially mathematically based programs put into a computer - the robot cannot read per se, it sees but doesn't read. Its like hearing but not listening, we've all done that haven't we? You hear something someone said to you but when asked to recall it you can't because you were not tuned in to actually listening - listening to the radio whilst you drive etc, etc.

So how would a crawler be able to tell if something is a copy of something else if it does not have it in its library. It will be able to determine it is copied IF it has a reason to in the first place and it has a trail to follow ......... yes, a link. If there is a link in the content then the crawlers will follow that link and bingo!! Secondly why would they look for a link? If the title of the content is the same as where it originally came from, and very much so if that title is in the "heading" of the page, then the crawler will possibly (not always) have seen that information recently on a crawl so that information would be in its current memory and trigger an alert.

Many things that Google say that its crawlers can do should be taken with a grain of salt - much is fact, some is moondust aimed at curbing practices they cannot control and minimizing content they cannot crawl. If they said copied content was ok how much more content would there be in the WWW - it would double or treble or more, as well as your own content you would use someone elses so as to boost your number of pages (I would). Copied content goes against the ethos of Googles position as professed to its users, i.e. to produce search results of quality that best match the searchers requirement ... bla bla bla. So of course they are going to say that they can find copied content.

And yes they can find it, but only ocassionally and only under certain circumstances. Importantly they DO NOT PENALIZE for copied content, they simply do not give you the brownie points you would get if it was original (like links, there is no such thing as a bad link, some are just better than others).

Google does not class free press releases, free articles etc etc as copied - why not? - is there a special code in the source html that tells the crawlers "hey its cool man we are allowing everyone to use this content" .... me thinks not Watson dear chap. The "free" stuff doesn't have any links in it - and not just in the text but anywhere including images, backgrounds etc.

How do I know this to be the case? - I DON'T - but in reading ship loads of posts on different sites it appears NO-ONE REALLY KNOWS - even Matt Cutts of Google contradicts himself on the issue (apparently). Applying my own algorithms sprinkled with some basic logic and a dash of street samrts topped up with "copied" ideas from others I think the above sounds kinda plausible.

So now lets have some comments. If I am wrong then I need to know (so I can delet a lot of stuff ) - but you have to convince me not just poo poo me.

cheers,
Mike

Quality of the content - this is a related but totally different subject on which I also have some views.

I disagree with you very much so! Google hates duplicated content and if your website or article is found duplicated it will suffer. I mean if your on page one or two with duplicated content on your site that is fine! Once Google knows its duplicated content though your rankings will get lower. That is why most of us webmasters do not take that kind of chance.

I actually agree with you. I have found that many people don't really understand the issue of "duplicate content" as it relates to Google. Statistically, with the volume of words out there on the Internet, every site is going to have some level of duplication with others, there's no way to avoid it.

What Google, in my opinion, pays attention to in cases of duplicate content it identifies, is give preference to the content it discovered first. I've seen that a lot as well.

That's my two cents..

[QUOTE=contentwriter;19839]I disagree with you very much so! Google hates duplicated content and if your website or article is found duplicated it will suffer. I mean if your on page one or two with duplicated content on your site that is fine! Once Google knows its duplicated content though your rankings will get lower. That is why most of us webmasters do not take that kind of chance.[/QUOTE]

Correct i am agree with you, and aside from what you've said another risk you will be put on your link by copying or putting a duplicate content and for the worst you might get banned.

[QUOTE=SEOserpent;19860]I actually agree with you. I have found that many people don't really understand the issue of "duplicate content" as it relates to Google. Statistically, with the volume of words out there on the Internet, every site is going to have some level of duplication with others, there's no way to avoid it.

What Google, in my opinion, pays attention to in cases of duplicate content it identifies, is give preference to the content it discovered first. I've seen that a lot as well.

That's my two cents..[/QUOTE]

Really Disagree, Google is not perfect when analyzing each content of the articles that may be index, it is important to the webmasters that each author has its own signature in creating content, everyone of us has the knowledge it must be furnished not to duplicate.

If you have a definition of a word in from a dictionary, and I have a definition for the same word from a different dictionary, they would still mean the same thing. They would however be explained a little differently (but probably not much). So think of how many millions of sites there are on the web and how many people are paid to write content for top ranked (in search and Alexa) websites. Now consider how many other people link to stories or use the "press this" feature of wordpress and sortof steal part of that story for their own sites and blogs. Even though google will assume that the first site (probably the site that owns the work) is the actual author and gives that site credit if you will, how can duplicate content really be looked down upon moreso than bad seo or stories that resemble but are not identical? There are so many sites with the same content its unreal! And some of these sites are doing pretty well!

Look at popular forums! Take a microsoft haters forum for instance. People post things in forums directly taken from Microsofts website over and over again all day everyday and the forum does really well in Alexa and search results. Thats just one example. But no matter how you look at it or weigh it out its still duplicate content throughout the forum. Let me know what you think. BTW this is my first post! I just joined!

@davey - Welcome!

@jhonsean -
I guess it just goes to show you put 10 different SEOs in one room and you get 10 different opinions.

The problem with google giving credit the content it discovers first is this, say your site is in the making and your crawls are few and far between. Then someone cuts and pastes your wonderful content and puts it on their own website, which gets crawled twice a day.

Now if google is designed in a way that it gives credit to first found content, then where is the justice there.

On the other hand, i was under the impression that your content and the keywords within that content are measured, their volume, the placements etc. So if it finds another page with exact placements, then a site may suffer, that is why content can be tweaked, re-publised as long as those keywords are moved, reduced increased etc.

As i observed in a search engine like google i think it is designed for "first come first served" basis meaning if they found your article new from the others then you have the place depending on how your story may compete to others.

yeah as others said you should make your content unique then other sites.
It will give you good results