I'm thinking this might be seen as dup content so I was wondering if I should not post an article I have submitted (I have already seen that it on Google) to my blog as well. Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Ryan

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Ryan Ward, REALTOR® - Keller Williams Realty Consultants. (404) 630-3187
Atlanta Real Estate - My featured area is Alpharetta Real Estate and it is where I call home. Read my Atlanta Real Estate blog.

I suppose that header, footer, the left page and the right page content is different on these sites. Also, you may insert some other content (even ads) between paragraphs of the article. If all above accomplished, it will not be considered duplicate content.

Just an opinion

Hey Ryan.

Having an article that's been published on other websites will not hurt your rankings any. It probably won't help, but it won't hurt either. The real problem is when you have duplicate content within your own site.

If the article will be useful to your readers ... publish away.

Good luck.

-Brandon

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Brandon Cornett
Real Estate SEO Support Center

Would this apply to a footer that is on every page of a website?

Hi Joe.

A footer on every page, such as a navigation menu, is nothing to worry about. Unique pages with a common element are still unique pages.

What I'm talking about is the blatant reproduction of pages -- exact duplicates -- for the purpose of artificially increasing website size.

Let me tell you a quick story on this. I worked for a company who had a bunch of real estate clients. One of my first tasks was to examine the reasons why a few of their sites had been banned from Google. These were relatively small sites, from a user's perspective ... maybe 8 or 10 pages each.

But when I checked the # of pages indexed by Google, there were hundreds of pages! I looked on the hosting account, ad lo and behold they had about 400 versions of the home page with unique, keyword-rich file names. Bingo!

That's what I mean by duplicate content. I scrapped all of these files, removed a couple of other questionable tactics, and these sites are all back in Google's index today.

Here's my rule of thumb on the whole black hat thing. If you're doing something that your readers can (A) see and (B) benefit from, you're good to go. But if you're doing something onsite that's purely for search engines and hidden from readers, you're playing a game of risk.

In my mind, the reprint article thing is more a question of website quality, not website SEO. The question to ask is, "Will these articles help my readers?" If so, publish away. Just be sure to have enough original content to balance things out.

More than you wanted to know? I tend to ramble early in the mornings!

-Brandon

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Brandon Cornett
Real Estate SEO Support Center

Thanks. Perfect response.