A big question for web-writers is, how much do we have to change content to prevent dupe content penalties?

Plagiarism and copyright laws aside, we don't want to copy/paste other people's content because Google won't give us credit for those pages.

New writers have often asked if they couldn't just save time and copy/paste material from other sites, and then just change some of the words around?

I've never been able to offer any more concrete answer than this one: Whether or not the search engines can recognize such rip-offs now, they will probably be pretty good at it sooner or later. Latent symantic indexing (dunno much about it) already recognizes the relationships between words, and even within synonym relationships. So my point has always been: Let's not chance it.

But I'd really like to know if anyone has more input on this.

Food for thought. The Preamble

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Wanna chew it a bit for us?

His point is that you can do that very specific search (Which is well known) and you come up with thousands of results all with the same content

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You guys aren't very helpful.

I think what you're saying is that, duplicate content isn't the damning issue I'm saying it is. Care to elaborate?

It's been an on-going discussion / debate, resulting in a goodly amount of link-baiting.

http://news.google.com/news?q=duplic...-a&sa=N&tab=wn

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All of those pages are indexed and cached with exactly the same text or at least majorily so. I am of the opinion that duplicate content only effects that which exists on the same domain.

In other words, If I copy one of my pages (or the pages aren't significantly unique) and I put it up on my site it would be duplicate content. If I take the same page and put it up on your site... it would be fine.

Certainly there are other considerations for not copying content (DMCA) but duplicate content to search engines is not one of them at this point IMO.

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OverSite.US | A Unique Web Directory
Real Estate Directory | A regional listing of quality real estate related web sites.
Tampa Bay Fishing | Seeks references from the area resource pages of quality local sites.

I was going to write a whole article on this for you Gerry (I might still) but in looking for supporting evidence either way, doing research etc I came across this post and BAM it is for the most part, the article I was going to write anyways (It's not 100% in agreement with what I have to say, but a damn good article and pretty close)

http://www.pandia.com/sew/169-duplicate-content.html <<< READ THIS!

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I checked this search and the second article, second paragraph had this:

"Duplicate content is not only about the pages on a site being the same or too similar. It can also be different websites using the same or very similar template."

From: http://www.americanchronicle.com/art...rticleID=18372

Question for REW, How would REW sites (particularly templates) fall into this?

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You’re a lot (a lot) better off publishing your own articles that point to your site, than using third party articles for content.

duh!

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