@gregorybuford No, they do not penalize you for duplicate content. Rather, they just don’t count the second one. It doesn’t get indexed, and it won’t show up in the search results, but they don’t take a negative action on that content.
If you want to avoid this issue, you need to change the copy at least 25%. I would shoot for at least 50%, in case they ever change it.

Excellent feedback!  Thank you.

@gregorybuford The answer & link from from @iamconsulting is definitely what you need to check out.  I wouldn’t suggest creating two sites with the same content – either one site will do, or make the content on the second site unique.  

@kristi-hines Thanks for the input.  This is definitely helpful!

How does this differ from article distribution which is supposed to help your ratings, right?

@rachelmaskell The main search benefit of article marketing is the inbound links created to your website in your bio at the bottom of each article. Since the Google Panda updates last year, the significance of article marketing has been drastically reduced. People used to use software to rewrite an article 20 times by switching paragraph order or substituting words, then post the results on 100 different article directories, thereby generating 100 links back to the main site (or even 2000 if they posted every version on 100 directories!). Since Panda, Google has cracked down on this practice, reducing the link-juice you get from these mass-distribution sites packed with mainly duplicate content and text ads. Like @erikdeckers said, it’s really only the first instance of the article that gets indexed that will be counted. You’ll need to modify it substantially to post on other article directories, and I would recommend no more than five total, rather than the mass quantities people were doing before. It’s still a good piece of your overall link-building campaign, but it doesn’t have nearly as much impact on its own as it used to, and shouldn’t be the only way you build links.

We like to post one place, make sure it gets indexed, and then post anywhere/everywhere else, but make sure to include a link back to the original article towards the top of the page. I vaguely remember Matt Cutts suggesting this was a good technique. 

@erikdeckers Why did all the scrapper sites get hurt so much last update if Goog is not penalizing for duplicate content? Or is not being indexed the punishment?

@k4satin We typically add that first sentence or two along the lines of:  ”Our colleagues at xyz posted a great article about [KW rich text for link] which we wanted to share. Questions? Ask in the comments section.”and then post verbatim. 

Since I am generally “the colleagues” I am writing about it makes me feel like I have multiple personality disorder, but seems to work well. I am mixed on article spinning, good technique, but I hate cluttering the internet. 

Best,   

@k4satin Exactly. I would place the article on the actual site I am promoting, see that get indexed, and then run wild with the “As seen on…” posts elsewhere on the web. 

This basically came out of the thought, “Why I am giving PRLog (or whoever) backlinks? Shouldn’t they be sending them to me?”

@erikdeckers – Yes! So many people talk about “duplicate content penalty” when Google states bluntly on their webmaster help pages that they do NOT penalize for duplicate content.

BTW, do you have a link from Google on the “no indexing” assertion? The reason I’m asking is because in the past, they would index both, but only return the page with higher relevance. They might well have changed that policy, thus my question. Thanks in advance.

@robpeck – from that same page: 

“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.”
I have no idea why people got hurt on Panda updates, won’t even speculate.

@doolin I don’t have that link.

@robpeck The aggregators got hurt by Panda because a lot of them would just collect stuff and then link back to the original article with a Read More link. They pulled in about 100 words or so, did it dozens of times a day, and Google decided they weren’t creating or offering good content.

What Panda wants is good writing and design on the websites they refer people to. Doing a 100 word excerpt for the purposes of creating hundreds of backlinks was not “good content,” and so they got dinged.

I wrote about this last year. http://problogservice.com/2011/08/09/google-wants-you-to-be-a-better-blog-writer/

@robpeck Well, to me (and Google), a duplicate “penalty” means they strike a site from their index, or at least bump it down the ranks, because there’s more than one version of it.

The Google Panda update penalized a lot of aggregators, not because they duplicated a few articles, but because they were providing a lot of very low-quality content. They were giving 100 word excerpts that would point to another 100 word excerpt, which sometimes led to the same 100 word excerpt, before finally going to the original. It provided no value and was being done strictly for the backlinks.

Google left the original page alone and dropped all the 100 word sites. Now, the original site may have been lowered because of the changes to the algorithm, but they didn’t go through and hammer on all the original sites.

@k4satin thank you for the clarification. Seems like there is a lot of gray area altogether too. I’ve started following the feed, any recommendations for websites to learn more?

@k4satin Your list nailed it. Only ones I would think to add are http://searchengineland.com/ and http://www.seobook.com/ 

Matt Cutts blog used to so helpful; it took a turn for the strange the past 6 months or so though. More about personal growth than SEO. 

Best, 

Orlando Social Media
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Blufishocean
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great discussion, thanks for asking this question @gregorybuford