Dupe Content, What’s the Deal-i-o?
Well I’ve been tooting my horn about the greatness of article syndication lately, but I’ve failed to highlight one aspect of it that may dampen it’s effectiveness: having the same article syndicated on many sites creates tons of duplicate content.
The implications of this are unclear though. Firstly, there’s a lot of confusion out there as to what a duplicate content penalty is, including if it even exists and how it works. We do know that when Google finds multiple copies of the same exact content, it tends to use the first copy of it (or, sometimes, the copy with the highest PageRank) when delivering results. This is known as the duplicate content penalty.
I am not however convinced that this is a penalty per se. I think of it more like a filter. The term "penalty" seems to imply that a site has done something naughty and needs to be punished in the SERPs, whereas a "filter" aids search quality by dampening the rankings for results that a searcher will probably not find useful.
Even if that issue was settled, it would be unclear if the fact that the pages were filtered/penalized for duplicate content would affect the value of a link from those pages. It is certainly logical to believe that link algorithms are run separate from other algorithms, with the results then aggregated into the overall search algorithm afterward. The short answer: I don’t know.
How this relates to article syndication: if every syndication instance after the first is truly penalized, then even if your article is syndicated 100 times, you will only gain the value from being linked from one of those instances (either the first instance, or the instance on a page with the highest PageRank). But both my instinct and anecdotal evidence tells me that this is not the case. Thoughts, anyone?
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