I'm seeing a lot about duplicate content here in Active Rain today so I thought to pass along what I've been mentioning to folks blogging at Star Power ...
Regards duplicate content and your blog posts, if they are duplicate to a page somewhere else on the web you should edit them to be different or you could eventually hurt yourself [or SP] in the indexes.
Please know that I don't want to be an alarmist, just to share that Google doesn't want duplicate pages in its index. For anyone interested, I can show an instance where over 4,100 blogs have the same exact pages and only one gets indexed. Google is not looking to police duplication, just to eliminate it.
If any of your pages are eliminated from the index the negative effects may include:
1) you may waste a spider crawl / waste any indexing of good key phrases from those pages,
2) you may have lost some ‘findability'
3) you may have thrown out any back links to that page otherwise favorable to your overall page rank.
4) It's also believed by some that duplicate pages are a bad behavior signal and that it may eventually have some kind of trust penalty.
5) And then finally on the topic, it's believed by some that Google's filters detect 50% + duplication on a page or post and drop it. Is it 50% in succession? Probably, but ...?
Bottom line, I never underestimate the folks at Google who have a business to serve and protect.
Realted Post on Duplicate Content AND Blogs
Chris Frerecks
Kinetic Knowledge LLC / Real Estate BlogsitesTM
Business Blogs / Real Estate Blogs
At Kinetic Knowledge LLC / Real Estate BlogsitesTM we believe in adding tremendous value. Clients come first - we can't succeed unless you do!
;)
;)
Chris - useful information! What about when you take the first paragraph of a blog to post somewhere else with a link to the original blog with attribution - is that penalized, too?