We get the Duplicate Content question, "may I copy content that I believe will be valuable to my audience?" quite often. Our answer, which really tries to address the question with both search engines and humans in mind, is always, "duplicating someones content is never a good practice and it can get you in trouble; however, within reason you may be able to excerpt some content you’d like to share. The excerpt[s] should always be less than half the post, you should block quote it and you should credit the author with a live link."

Admittedly this advice is based upon hearsay, but the consensus seems to agree it’s the way to go. Google, which [itself] isn’t that far off, defines duplicate content as, "substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar." They also say, "Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional or at least not malicious in origin… In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries."  And finally they add you should not concern yourself with occasional snippets or quotes being identified as duplicate content, but in the event you are removed from the search results you must review webmaster guidelines. Once you’ve corrected the problem based upon those guidelines and the site is in order you can submit it for reconsideration.  

But what does Google actually say about the consequences for duplicate content? Apparently, during spider crawling and then the serving of search results, they trust their algorithms to rank similar pages correctly. When filters do identify the intent to manipulate rankings or to deceive searchers, the appropriate adjustments in the ranking are made *but they readily admit they’d rather rely on their filters than on making ranking adjustments.* I’ll add they don’t define "adjustments" so one can only conclude the range lies somewhere between a lesser rank to actual removal. Your guess is as good as mine; however, it’s likely that your time, effort, cost and future business is at risk when duplicating content.

According to SEOMoz.org’s Eric Enge in his post ‘When Duplicate content really hurts’, "Conventional wisdom among experienced SEOs is that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. There are exceptions to this rule. Search engines implement a filter… there is apparently a duplicate content threshold where Google’s filter will identify and actually penalize a site." He says, "I write this based upon a combination of heresay and also some experience we’ve had we could only speculate about." Enge also warns that Search Engine spiders only visit with so much crawl bandwidth or what he refers to as budget. If you waste those crawls on content that won’t be indexed successfully, you are sacrificing other useful content that could have been indexed.

In a similar instance we can only speculate about, we had a client who was copying the lead stories from their local newspaper. Low and behold, one day they disappeared from the search engine results pages [SERPs] eliminating their potential for consumer findability. Let’s face it, the vast majority of consumers are searching and they are researching so I’m certain no Advertorial Blog owner would ever want removal.

Folks, regardless of what one can and cannot get away with you must - at least - demonstrate a trustworthy, knowledgeable and value adding presence on the web. If the search engines don’t penalize you, the humans most certainly will. Considering the guidelines mentioned above [and I was careful to excerpt less than half this post], please do NOT duplicate content without thoughtful care and good reason!

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