Quote:
Originally Posted by edgeprod
Also, you mentioned that whole "duplicate content" thing with the SE's .. it makes me wonder about the whole thing.
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Duplicate content problems are by far overrated. If google detects duplicate content, which isn't determined in general but always by search term, it influences the ranking for this search term. Which content is ranked best when duplicates exist is determined by several factors.
No harm done so far. It only becomes a problem when google detects alot of duplicate content, especially if it's on the same site (e.g.: If you post the same post 15 times on one domain), which can influence the spider activity and general ranking of the site. (penalties, even kick in worst case)
The idea was to get rid of all the DMOZ and WIKI clones, but a reasonable ammount of duplicate content, which is harder for google to detect than often assumed, especially when placed on different domains, doesn't hurt.
So, the reason why hand written blogs get more traffic isn't because others that just syndicate sponsor feeds suffer from duplicate content (with some rare exceptions, if two blogs use just one sponsor feed, the same template and the same permalink structure). It's because the text is longer, contains more targetted keywords, link structure is better, etc.