The myth of duplicate content

[v9designbuild]

It has long been established that everyone should avoid duplicating content on their websites. It is even on Google's list of forbiddens on its spam report - (http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html) under "Duplicate site or pages".

Recently, a real estate client of mine found that his ex-partner had not only taken the entire text from his website but was also involved in copying his links and articles to such an extent that he left, on one article, the company's copyright notice intact. This had gone so far and for so long that he also noticed his ex-partner had stolen the logo of a corporate UK high street real estate agent, flipped it and used it for his new company. To add insult to injury, the original website was then copied five times using various related search terms as the domain name, SEOed them all and linked them together. They all share high visibility on Google.

Needless to say, after having warned him of these shoddy practices, my client was left with no option but to report these abuses to Google under the auspices of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). They took a look and banned four duplicate pages only on all the sites but completely ignored the fact that all six websites are indeed keyword spams in order to gain high placement. They are identical and even the properties come from the same database.

Google has been aware and repeatedly reminded for months of this, but to no avail.

With the advent of datafeed-driven content sites and RSS, what are we to make of these stated penalties when Google themselves don't apply their own rules to the issue of duplicate content?

[morepro]

This doesn't seem so cut & dry as you have described. Definitely, there is frustration at seeing a cheater succeed, but perhaps there are other factors involved in the sites not being penalized, etc.

The duplicate content issue is no myth.

[kscope]

Maybe not a myth, but it is beyond highly prevalent!

I keep a constant eye on competitor sites, and I see the one piece of content run across up to seven of their 'sister sites', and in many cases see their placing 4 times in the top 10 on very competitive and lucrative keywords.

So if we know something on this it is that Google do not do much in the way of policing duplicate content.

[samplerbanker]

Official Google statement about "duplicate content"
http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=66359

[rensquared]

Duplicate content?? thats plagarism right?

[rapidvectorseo]

I did report a site which had copied one of my website content and in just 7 days Google had banned it.