Forgive me if I posted this question in the wrong section.

I take local real estate news stories and post the first few paragraphs in my blog and then make a link to the story. I think it is useful to visitors wanting info on my real estate market. I am wondering if I will eventually be penalized for duplicate content. I have been doing this awhile with no trouble. I would think that if I provide a link to where I got the information then I would not get in trouble but who knows. Any thoughts?

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Marc Rasmussen
Michael Saunders and Company

Sarasota Real Estate

I was wondering the same thing since many blogs are simply copy & paste news, articles, photos, etc. When I prepare news items with a link I make my own intro. This means I usually only take specific items that I feel are interesting to my local area since it isn't copying an article and therefore takes longer.

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Southwest Chicago Suburbs Real Estate is an affordable area with close access to downtown Chicago. Money Magazine says that Orland Park real estate is one of the best places to live in the U.S. Next door you can find Tinley Park homes for sale and get Orland Park amenities at a more affordable price.

Search engines are finicky when it comes to duplicate content. In most cases if an SE picks up on a substantial amount of duplicate content they may impose a penalty on the newer of the two web sites (new as in the length of time each domain has been registered).

With that in mind, it's a logical assumption that it would be easier for SE's to pick up on duplicate content on sites that are cross-linked.

The truth is that search engines ignore a ton of duplicate content, and there are no hard and fast rules as to how much dupe content will trigger a penalty. Look at how many RSS feeds and article echanges are on the internet today.

For example, one of our clients had submitted what was purported to be original content for their web site when in fact the content was copied from a print magazine. Many other agents in this area copied the same community descriptions for their own web sites. But our client still dominated the SERP's on Yahoo, MSN, and Google despite the duplicate content. But to be on the safe side I have since replaced these 15+ pages of descriptions with original content.

If you want to err on the side of caution, use your robots.txt or meta tags to exclude pages on your web site that contain the same information as your blog.

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Real Estate Web Design & SEO | Orlando Real Estate | Hilton Head Hotels and Resorts

its an interesting question, with your blog entries you are basically creating pages that are a collection of pieces of duplicate content, arranged in a linear format. Because the collection of dup content is organized in a unique manner does this make it appear unique? I dont know, but its a possibility. Also I think SE's recognize the nature of blogs as opposed to regular sites and they "may" (Again just a thought thrown out there) make concesions for blog entries, as by their nature they are useful tools to get all your news in one place so to speak.

This is a question I would like to see brought up at a roundtable at SES hopefully one with Matt and Danny on it (They often sit on a panel together)

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Want to save up to 50% off Real estate webmasters product websites & common upgrades? Check out my latest blog post regarding our end of the year sale.

I also keep a blog and use local news stories for information, but I never copy exactly. To me it is more of a copyright issue and I want to protect the intellectual property rights of the copyright holder.

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Sam Chapman
Austin, Texas
Austin, TX Real Estate |Austin Luxury Homes |Austin Real Estate Blog