Duplicate Content is Good ..

[gadget]

Tweet

I'm looking for a new pension and as part of my research I typed "best pension 2006" into Google.

Five of the search results were pages from five different websites featuring exactly the same article by Jeff Salway.

best pension 2006 - Google Search

This article was published in Aug 2006 .. plenty of time for the bots to penalise these sites for duplicate content but clearly this hasn't happened.

I've always been very careful to avoid duplicate content but perhaps I've been over sensitive in the past and should rethink this going forward?

[DavidCartlidge]

That is rather poor of Google to show the same article so many times - it's not even as though they each have their own summary/comments to it.

I guess there is enough extra guff, menues, headers, footers etc, that it does not trigger whatever duplicate threshold there may, or may not, be.

[trevHCS]

Right now it's not picking it up, but remember that in 6 months time they might change the algo a little and suddenly they'll all be gone. Best idea is to put out content that's really useful to people so maybe duplicate the content, but rewrite. That way you also don't have to stress about each and every Google change.

It's getting better at spotting dups, but if you have 8 billion+ pages to check, it's pretty hard to find all the duplication across the entire lot.

Trev

[gadget]

It's getting better at spotting dups, but if you have 8 billion+ pages to check, it's pretty hard to find all the duplication across the entire lot.
Trev

It might be hard but the whole SEO debate is that duplicate content is bad. This example, whilst rare, just made me think that perhaps we're being too sensitive to duplicate content.