Duplicate content, PR and penalties

[sew2002]

Our website often publishes press releases from companies. Of course, press releases are not original content, so I'm wondering if that will hurt our PR in the long run.

I've read somewhere that if your content is duplicative of other's on the Internet, your PR will be lowered, and that if you have too MUCH duplicative content, your site will be dropped from google as a spam site. Is any of this true?

What do people mean when they say your PR will be lowered by duplicaitve content? Does it mean that:

(a) Every page on the internet with the same duplicative content will receive a lower PR because google knows it is not unique. or

(b) My entire website's PR is lowered because I carry duplicative content.

Option (a) is ok. I'm willing to carry a page with a PR1 if it means the press release will be useful to my users. But if (b) is the way thigns work, then I will probably stop carrying press releases.

[subnetrx]

as far as I know, your PR will not be lowered, but duplicate pages will be dropped out of the directory.

[sew2002]

That makes sense.

If the duplicative page is dropped out of the search engine, will that affect the web page hosting the duplicate page? I.E. will a website made up of primarily duplicate content get blacklisted by google?

[WillSpencer]

At one time, I would have said that duplicate content would not get you a PR penalty.

However, in December I brought a new site online. This site was to be a spin-off of one of my existing sites. Because of this, all pages except the index page were duplicate content.

My idea was to let the domain age and suffer under the duplicate content penalty as I built links to it.

I built enough links to the site to give the main page an easy PR5. (I have lots of PR5 sites.)

The site never rose above PR0.

Of course, if PR is dead, this may be a moot point. :cool:

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

I have often seen websites that had 100% duplicate content (i.e. several domains DNS'ed to the same website). So the dropped domains do get a penalty this way - and you never know which domain the engines choose to keep.

Websites with only partially duplicate content from other sites I have never seen completely dropped from the index. Often press releases and such will be published on pages that have sufficient original content (navigation, general info, internal related info, comments from users etc) to stay clear of duplicate check. The more "original" you can make it the better.

[Marcia]

if PR is dead, this may be a moot point.I seriously doubt that it's dead and won't believe it until there' something tangible to go by. Toolbar PR may be dead, and I wouldn't blame them. As always it's the few that spoil it for everyone, causing everyone permanent loss for their personal temporary gain.

It doesn't have to be dead; they can use it and keep it to themselves quite nicely. How many times were people told that their sites didn't have sufficient PR to be in the index. If there's 2 sites identical only one will get PR - which is only fair. Simple - the one with no PR can't be in the index. *If* that's how it works, which makes sense to me, if it's different from hand removal.

However, in December I brought a new site online. This site was to be a spin-off of one of my existing sites. Because of this, all pages except the index page were duplicate content.That isn't a spin-off, it's a mirror copy. :)

My idea was to let the domain age and suffer under the duplicate content penalty as I built links to it.That isn't how a spin-off site works. To spin off, you spin off to something original and unique - even if it's very small to begin with.

I built enough links to the site to give the main page an easy PR5. (I have lots of PR5 sites.)Which more than likely show up as related on the webmap. And a dup site can't carry PR - unless the original loses it, which isnt good because the new one still has to age long eough to meet algorithmic requirements needed now.

[WillSpencer]

That isn't a spin-off, it's a mirror copy. :)

My bad... I failed to explicity state "And then I would remove that portion of the content from the original site" and also "the new site only contained pages from one section of the original site."

However -- if I had removed those pages from the original site immediately, it would (obviously) not have shown this interesting little phenomena. :)

[Marcia]

Will, was the intention to move that section OFF the original site and onto the new one? If I were doing that I'd pull the section of the old site and do a 301 redirect from that section to the new site. Still it's possibly still better to re-vamp.

Or couldn't the section have stayed on the old as it had been, but just re-do all original content for the spin-off site?

[WillSpencer]

Will, was the intention to move that section OFF the original site and onto the new one? If I were doing that I'd pull the section of the old site and do a 301 redirect from that section to the new site. Still it's possibly still better to re-vamp.

Or couldn't the section have stayed on the old as it had been, but just re-do all original content for the spin-off site?

Two very good ideas.

But if I had done that, I would have missed this interesting PR phenomena. :)

My original thought was "lets create the new site and let it sit for a year or so completely ignored and only pay attention to it once its past the theoretical sandbox date". Due to that small original scoping, I never bothered to think forward to better ideas. :o