Comments on: Understanding duplicate content: Outside view

Duplicate content from external sites may seem like an uncontrollable issue, but there are steps that can be taken to reduce the concerns.

[BrickMarketing]

How about talking about the effect that duplicate content truly has on a site and if it has any at all when your site is the one being copied? Many people are a bit confused on those subjects.

[brbrown]

As long as the steps above are being followed (including links back to the original site) then most sites probably shouldn't be impacted too deeply. The links back should help to signal the canonical source of the information. Some who steal content do it programmatically by scraping pages and many of these links will remain, and for those who do strip out the links, they are probably stealing content from many other sites and therefore don't have a very authoritative profile to begin with.

If the content appears on another site that is considerably more authoritative to than the original site, that is an occasion when the syndicated content may outrank the original site. However at this point, an authoritative site like that is more likely to include the byline or links back to the original source, and in this case, that site may get more traffic and therefore even being outranked in search results may be beneficial since that site may send more traffic or further boost the authority of the original site because of the content and the links.

But this is why it is better to try to avoid those situations anyway by offering to create unique content for those highly authoritative sites to begin with.

In a lot of cases, there is enough difference between the two pages on the differing sites that duplicate content filtering may not come into play anyway.

The bigger issue for most sites will be internal duplication...which I'll be diving into next.

[SEOCOMPANY]

A really interesting post wherein different means of content duplication is seen.