Is Duplicate Content really a penalty?

[dasheriprock]

Up until now, I've always just submitted articles to ezinearticles.com but now I'm thinking I might be missing the boat. If I use a service like articlemarketer.com and they distribute to their 300 article directories, that doesn't really hurt me does it? SE's may filter out 290 of the places it apppears as duplicate content, but I still get 10 articles out there right?

Also, and this is the main one, if something is filtered out as duplicate content does that mean that the backlink is also null and void?

[MattUK]

I think to get penalised for dupe content the entire page has to be very similar. There are too many situations where the 'majority' of the content on a page would be similar for this to happen.

Imagine a two sites where the paragraphs, titles, metas, menus and navigation are all the same. This I'm sure would get a duplicate penalty.

In the second instance everything is different apart from the bulk of the paragraph content. I don't believe this would be penalised.

Aprt from lyrics and articles sites, consider RSS syndication. The whole concept would be flawed if any pages delivering RSS were penalised.

[dasheriprock]

So if I use an article distribution service then I will get credit for all those backlinks correct? Some of them might get filtered out, but a lot will stick?

[mugshot]

Is your intention only to acquire links?

Because out of the 300 article directories, I would venture to say that majority of them are useless and link weights are heavily discounted by the major SEs.

And the dup content theory does confuse things somewhat when it comes to article submissions. But then again, if your article is solid, why distribute it to so many places? If the article is truly unique, you shouldn't have a problem getting links to it naturally.

[Robert_Charlton]

...Also, and this is the main one, if something is filtered out as duplicate content does that mean that the backlink is also null and void?

dasheriprock - This is something I've long felt to be true... that the backlink wouldn't count in syndicated articles... but I have no proof for it.

Not all dupe content is automatically filtered, though. I have seen duplicates of some classical articles rank well in competitive searches when both pages had a large number of high quality, independent inbound links. In this case the effects of links in the articles may involve other considerations.

My guess is that the links still might not be counted. Matt Cutts mentioned at SES last year that Google discounts links not only with identical anchor text, but links that have identical descriptions. In a sense, I hypothesize, you might consider the text surrounding a link in an article to be an extended description... and syndicated articles would in effect be duplicate descriptions.

I'm not sure what the duplication threshold would be though, as it's probable that some naturally occurring links will have identical anchor text or descriptions.

If you find good quality sites willing to put up an article that links to you, it might be worth your while to create unique content for them.